Artist Lady skollie is on a mission to defy taboos by tackling themes surrounding sexuality, consent and violence with her evocative, erotically charged works
What do drawings of fruit have to do with female empowerment? Well, that’s what you may be thinking when you first lay eyes on Lady Skollie’s kaleidoscopic multimedia artworks. However, there’s something deeper at play here, and it goes far beyond representing a fruit salad.
‘I am angry about a lot of things. Mostly pertaining to existing on this planet as a woman.’ These words make it a must to get to know Lady Skollie. Born in 1987 to a teacher mother and lawyer father, Laura Windvogel grew up in the Cape Town suburb of Retreat. As a child, she and her musically inclined younger sister Kim showed a keen interest in art. Their mother, who never got to explore her creative side academically, enrolled Laura in the Frank Joubert Art Centre, where she would go on to indulge her creative side three times a week for nine years.
After matriculating, Laura went on to study fine art at the University of Cape Town for two years before calling it quits. ‘I realised it wasn’t for me, even though I knew I wanted to be an artist. I reluctantly finished with a degree in art history instead.’ After a few years working in retail, Laura quit her job to pursue art full-time.
In 2013, while the artist kept her Tumblr profile active with what she referred to as her ‘slightly offensive watercolours’ and film photography, she played around with the idea of making a small, informal, submission-based project called Kaapstad Kinsey, which was centred around people’s first sexual experiences. The response was so incredible that soon a magazine was born, in which Laura depicted those personal stories through her erotic paintings. It was also around this time that she started establishing herself as Lady Skollie, the latter word referring to the derogatory Afrikaans term for a crook or naughty child. For her, it’s both a reclamation of the word ‘skollie’ and a merging of her feminine and masculine energies.
Following Kaapstad Kinsey’s unprecedented popularity, Laura received a commission from Mail and Guardian in 2016 to create a work for the cover of its annual Abafazi supplement honouring South Africa’s Women’s Month. Cut-cut, kill-kill, stab-stab: a South African love story by Lady Skollie it depicts a paw-paw surrounded on all sides by pocket knives that are about to penetrate the fruit from all sides. ‘I was actually asked to make something positive, but the energy of forever waiting to be hurt – always at the tip of a knife – is what inspired me instead,’ she says. ‘My anger takes many forms, usually in online tirades, sometimes in scathing comments wrapped in humour. I don’t know how to translate all of this anger into action; I’m trying to focus my energy into making the world a better place for women, when it has never been a great world for us to begin with’, she writes in her op-ed that was published in Abafazi.
Paw-paws, and bananas to a degree, have become synonymous with the Lady Skollie oeuvre. But Laura’s decision to use this particular fruit goes deeper than just the perceived link to female genitalia. ‘The paw-paw is a bizarre symbol of femininity for me; the way it can go rotten in just a few hours. Its transience is an inspiration. Being a woman is the biggest theme that inspires my work because it is such a complex state of being: extreme highs and extreme lows, and extreme violence paired with extreme nurturing and care,’ she explains.
Despite a large proportion of South Africans being quite conservative, there’s no question that Laura’s work struck a chord among the general public. When asked how people usually react to it, she says, ‘First laughter, then tears. South Africans always laugh before they cry. People are drawn in very quickly. I have seen people at art exhibitions even reaching out to touch the work. I think they feel overwhelmed.’
For the full Lady Skollie spread, page through your March issue of ClubX.
