Try to pin down Majak Bredell and you’ll probably get it wrong. She is an artist, yes, but also a mother, grandmother and thinker. “I have been a wife, I have been an ex-wife, I have been an employee and a teacher; now I am just me,” she says.
Her cobalt blue house, set against the slopes of Mariepskop, has views that stretch into Mozambique in shades of green and blue and purple. The garden is vast and peaceful. Where her father’s vegetables once grew, Majak is cultivating other things in the studio she built when she moved to the lowveld nine years ago. The ground is fertile, and ideas take root.
“South African art is pretty sophisticated,” she says. “It’s not afraid to go into deep and dangerous places, so my art isn’t controversial in that context. But in Kampersus? Maybe. In the church? Yes.”
Majak is perhaps best-known for her goddess work, which started with her Sacred Mirror series and which she went on to explore in Alter Images. This is a body of work where she asks, what would be different if the prevailing image in Christianity was a woman giving birth instead of a man dying on a cross?
She wonders, too, what that image would mean for women’s bodies and how people feel about them and treat them. “And if we revered a birthing icon,, would women be at war with themselves?”
These ideas have fuelled Majak’s research, poetry and art over the years. “The female as creator or co-creator has come to make more sense to me than the idea of a man speaking the universe into being,” she says.
While these ideas can be frightening, “that’s what I deal in – truths and ideas that challenge the way organised monotheistic religion tells us about who we are, or excludes us from featuring at all.
“If I didn’t have to paint what I paint I would do landscapes – they’re much easier,” she laughs.
Majak was born in Kroonstad, lived on a farm and went to boarding school. “It was awful, expect for my art teacher, Myrrha Bantok.” After leaving school, she studied art and worked as a fashion illustrator. She married in 1967 and had two children.
She began to paint more seriously in 1977, after seeing Ron Kitaj’s work on a trip to London. His grasp of figure drawing gave new impetus to her interest in the genre.
Majak moved to New York in 1981 and separated from her husband in 1982. She stayed in New York so her children would know their father. “I made a decision as a mother, but it was probably the best decision I ever made. Who I am grew out of this,” she says.
It wasn’t the pace of New York that excited Majak; rather it was the support given to art and the many avenues of study available. “I have always thought alternatively and in New York feminist is not a dirty word. It’s just a woman who’s proud to be a woman on her terms,” she adds.
She worked as an art director at Saatchi and Saatchi, and taught drawing and composition at the Pratt Institute. She used her free time making art. “To me, the most important thing is doing the work,” she explains. “I am driven. If I go too long without making my art I almost can’t breathe.”
In 2004 she came home. “Africa is a jealous mother. I missed having my name pronounced correctly. I missed the bush. I missed the massive sky and the shape of the days. Here, the sun rolls across the day. In the city days are angular, and I yearned for that organic sense of time.”
When she bought her four siblings’ shares in her parents’ home in Kampersus, “some people thought I was crazy,” she concedes, “but to me this place represents the pelvic bones of mother earth.”
She has transformed the house, filling it with light and creating many places of repose, dotted with small shrines of objects she loves, space for her grandchildren to play, and hundreds and hundreds of books.
“It’s important my home has lots of colour and places where the eye can rest. I couldn’t use colour in my New York apartment where I worked because it starts affecting how you work;,” she explains.
Now that she has a studio, she puts the space to good use. It is full of finished works and works in progress.
Soft, even light illuminates the women pressed up against her studio wall. Their embodied forms are marked with words that run over jutting hips and breasts, in what is just a fraction of a 20 metre-long artwork entitled Roll Call.
The work is an exploration of the witch-hunts that plagued much of Europe for more than 600 years, where lurid witch mythologies used women’s bodies to inscribe patriarchy’s philosophy on society in the cruellest of ways.
“There wasn’t an evil flare-up of witches that just happened, it was created by misogyny and attitudes to the body,” Majak says. This work remembers these women and names them, in a monochromatic palette of graphite, oil wash and pastel.
Roll Call is part of a new body of work Majak is creating under the theme On Her Body. “I have been blessed, or cursed, with working with women’s issues as they relate to the body,” she explains.
“My work has always focused on women who have been marginalised – outsiders and others who have been defined and positioned by men according to patriarchy’s hierarchical mind; the structures of power and thinking that operate in society.”
These themes are always demanding and often exhausting. “Roll Call came about when I broke my back two years ago. The pain in my back opened me to the pain the people persecuted as witches suffered.
“It is my destiny to work this way, this is what I am,” she says.
Majak’s speech is animated and her words are both sharp and generous. Her hair is wet from swimming with her grandkids and she sips on rooibos tea. “I have no idea what people think of me and don’t care,” she laughs.
There is something of Frida Kahlo in her posture and her favourite icon is a goddess of compassion. Her pantry is a visual feast of crockery collected from around the world, each grouping a still life.
In her kitchen, there is a picture of her father holding strawberries and her mother with two grinning sheep heads. Each year, she measures her grandkids’ height on the kitchen door, and their art and photos are dotted around the house. She has two cats, Dinge and Speckles.
The setting sun casts the shadow of the mountain over the house. The air smells of sun-soaked frangipani and rosemary, and a chicken is roasting in the oven.
“What people of faith have compared to people like me,” Majak says, “is the security of a belief system that they don’t have to question. That to me is imprisonment. I prefer the path of search.”
