Janique MANSFIELD

Janique Tyla Mansfield of Janiquetm Art, is a young ultra-realist artist based in South Africa. For years she has been told to “stop being a human photocopier”, but realism is so much more to her than that, for she has always had a love of bringing a moment to life and making sure it will never fade. During her final year she has chosen to embrace this new passion for objects and combine it with her everyday struggle with social anxiety. Her body go work entitled Comfort in Isolation, are of isolated objects, each object is explored through two artworks: a hyper-realistic graphite drawing that has no background and only a slight shadow to create the illusion of space, and a painting on canvas that shows Mansfield’s different stages of anxiety, using three different sections in different styles. Mansfield intends the drawings to trigger the viewer’s memory linked to the object, and also shows the comfort Mansfield feels in being alone with these objects through the act of drawing them. The paintings on the other hand explore her different stages of anxiety, using three different sections in different styles, and abruptly ‘unfinished’, masking tape threatening to curl from the canvas at any moment. Therefore along with showing her own anxiety, the paintings also seek to make the viewer uncomfortable in their state of incompletion. There is one object, a butterfly knife, that is only represented by a drawing and has no accompanying painting adding to the viewer’s sense of un-ease. Furthermore Mansfield has made 13 drawings, eluding to un-lucky number 13, then once installed in two columns of what should be 7 each, one collumn is uncannily left with one ‘missing’.