Phillipa HOBBS (b. 1955)
Heartpulp
1995
woodcut
edition 65/65
45 x 37.5 cm
BIOGRAPHY
Philippa Hobbs is an art historian, artist and art collector. She studied art at the Johannesburg College of Art before finishing a post-graduate printmaking course at the University of the Arts (Philadephia). She then furthered her studies through the University of South Africa (UNISA) and the Technikon Witwatersrand (now the University of Johannesburg), where she was a professor of art from 1979 to 1993, and also the Head of Printmaking.
Since 2006, Hobbs has worked as Curator of the MTN Art Collection, a corporate art collection.
In 1996, she was invited to contribute to the Images of Human Rights project, which involved artists visually interpreting each clause of South Africa’s Bill of Rights. Her woodcut, Received by the Tongue, arising out of Clause 8: Freedom of Expression, shows the precarious balance between rights of expression and the subsequent consequences.
Hobbs established her own printmaking studio, Footprint Studio, to offer visual training and printmaking guidance to beginners and advanced artists.
In 1997, she co-published Printmaking in a Transforming South Africa (David Philip Publishers) with Elizabeth Rankin, which describes the technical and expressive components of printmaking, while also exploring the role it played as a form of resistance during the liberation struggle.
In 2003, Hobbs and Rankin published Rorke’s Drift Empowering Prints (Double Storey Books), which looks at the Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre, popularly known as Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre. The book discusses the art produced by the black artists who studied there, including its first-enrolled student Allina Ndebele, whose work Hobbs has researched extensively in other publications.
Hobbs’s 2006 publication, Messages and Meaning, a catalogue for the MTN Art Collection, features essays by writers such as Nessa Leibhammer, Elizabeth Rankin and Wilma Cruise and explores how the collection is ‘a tool for social investment, an educational resource, a means of inspiring in-house communication and debate, and a showcase of South African and African art to visitors’.
Hobbs has also contributed to the Taxi series of art publications and written the corresponding Taxi Art Education Supplements for school teachers and learners.