“This is how I work: I draw, sew on paper and fabric, collage stolen bits and pieces, make sculpture and write poems” – Eliza Kentridge
Eliza Kentridge (b. 1962, Johannesburg) is a UK-based artist and award-winning poet whose practice spans textile, drawing and collage. Kentridge’s art is a quiet appreciation of the quirks and pleasures of everyday life. She often works in her father’s home in London, when away from her Wivenhoe studio. Having a shared childhood with her older brother and fellow artist, William Kentridge, her work provides an overlapping but distinctly different perspective on the domestic memories and images that inform both of their practices.
Throughout Kentridge’s decades-long career, she has frequently used old and found materials to explore simple realities and ordinary gestures. She uses ideas from the real world and from her imagination. “My images are often figurative but not always realistic. I anthropomorphise a lot, something I have done since childhood. I have also sewn since I was little but it was around the time that I had my second child and saw work by Tracey Emin, Louise Bourgeois and the Asafo flags that I began to re-engage with the medium. My approach to colour and form has an affinity with the likes of Sonia Delauney, Annie Albers, Henri Matisse and El Anatsui. Despite being based in a village, I have never been drawn to landscape vistas, always instead much more focused on valuing the unsung domestic moments” – Kentridge.
Kentridge’s latest body of work involves drying used tea bags and sewing these discarded objects together to create embroidered tapestries. The idea of repurposing and stitching tea bags, and treating the delicate dried paper-cloth as an art form, emerged from Kentridge’s daily tea-drinking rituals with her 101-year-old father. The old tea bags bear witness to long conversations and silent companionship. They become different objects when left to dry for hours. The laborious and intricate embroidering process pays homage to the humble markings of time that come with the invisible intimate care woven into these experiences.
Tasting Menu brings these latest works to London for the first time, alongside a selection of earlier works, to give a broad sense of the artist’s trajectory.
Kentridge has exhibited in London, New York, Wivenhoe and Johannesburg, and she has works in the artist book collections of the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress, one of which is on view as part of this exhibition. From 2012, Kentridge has regularly visited and worked at Dieu Donné Papermill in New York, creating a series of paper pulp paintings, some of which are included in Tasting Menu. In 2014, she completed a residency at Joshua Tree in California, making a series of works with felt, a selection of which is featured in the exhibition. The following year, Kentridge published her first book of poetry, Signs For An Exhibition (2015), which tracked her mother’s long illness through meditations upon her own South African childhood. The book was joint winner of the University of Johannesburg’s Debut Prize for Literature; and composer Philip Miller turned some of these poems into a song cycle which premiered at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2022. Kentridge is currently working on a new collection of poetry under the provisional title Dog Days, Dark Nights.
In the 1980s, Kentridge studied literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, and drawing and printmaking at Oxford Polytechnic. Since 1990, she has lived and worked in Wivenhoe, where she co-founded and runs Wivenhoe Printworks.
Instagram: @elizakentridge