Liza Grobler, working with mohair crotchet with burnt protea branches

Liza Grobler was Social Fabric artist-in-residence exploring mohair. In this mohair-based art work, Liza Grobler references a great fire that burned for weeks through thousands of hectares of nature reserve lying between Cape Town and the Cape of Good Hope. Burnt indigenous plants, proteas and fynbos left blackened carcasses. Burning may well be a natural cycle for the plants, generating new life, but many animals were injured or killed. The traumatised landscape and the natural protective qualities of mohair came together in Liza's choice to envelop scorched protea stems in crocheted mohair. The tenderness of the resulting object is strangely compelling. The use of pristinely white yarn was intentional, and Liza remarked upon how the charcoal surface of the sticks came to rub or draw on the yarn. That the sticks also look like animal legs, now wrapped in bandages or sweaters, adds to the work's eerie sweetness.