Emma Willemse
Emma Willemse is a conceptual artist, art educator and curator.
She is interested in ideas concerning place, placemaking, loss of place, displacement and sense of place. Her art works are technically diverse and include installations, painting, drawing, printmaking, film and artist’s books.
She has exhibited extensively locally and overseas, and her award-winning artist’s books have been exhibited in Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Johannesburg, Florence, Paris and London and at the Dak’Art in Senegal.
She holds a master’s degree in visual arts and qualifications in psychology and librarianship.
In 2022 she was the recipient of the Medal of Honour for Humanities and the Arts awarded by the South African Academy for Science and Arts.
artwords – on memory and loss
2023-10-30The wildfire that tore across Table Mountain and on to UCT’s campus destroyed not only the physical archive of materials and records, but also aspects of historical memory. The object makes visible and tangible the loss of a library, representing not only UCT’s Jagger Library but also other archives, where materials and objects have been lost forever, and, in this case, where numbers (Dewey Decimal Classification) embody a larger set of meanings.