Pippa Ann SKOTNES (b. 1957)
Untitled
1990
hand-coloured etching
edition 36/60
74.5 x 54 cm
Three Landscape Studies x 3
1982
etching
edition 2/15
36 x 45.5 cm
Three Landscape Studies x 3
1982
etching
edition 2/15
36 x 45.5 cm
Three Landscape Studies x 3
1982
etching
edition 2/15
36 x 45.5 cm
BIOGRAPHY
Pippa Skotnes is an artist, curator, scholar, and director of the Centre for Curating the Archive at Michaelis School of Fine Art the University of Cape Town.
She has a BAFA degree, a Post Graduate Diploma in Printmaking, a Master of Fine Art degree and a Doctor of Literature degree. Her major interests include book arts, curatorship and archive, in particular the Bleek and Lloyd collection and its extended archive.
Major projects have included various publications around the Bleek and Lloyd archive including Sound from the Thinking Strings (1991, which won the UCT Book Award); In the Wake of the White Wagons (1993, which was the Standard Bank Young Artist Award Winner exhibition); Miscast: negotiating the presence of Bushmen (1996, which accompanied a major exhibition at the SA National Gallery); The Digital Bleek and Lloyd, a complete, searchable digital archive published with the book Claim to the Country (2007); Unconquerable Spirit: George Stow’s history paintings of the San (2008, accompanied by an exhibition at Iziko South African Museum); Rock Art Made in Translation (2010, to accompany an exhibition at the Iziko SAM) and Landscape to Literature (2011), a catalogue to the exhibition of the same name at the Michaelis Galleries, which marked the centenary conference of the publication of Bleek and Lloyd’s Specimens of Bushman folklore.
Publications include Uncertain Curature: In and Out of the Archive (with Carolyn Hamilton, 2014) and The Courage of ||kabbo (with Janette Deacon, 2014). Skotnes is currently working on a book about a 19th-century murder in the northern Cape, as well as a project about the nature of composition.
The Centre for Curating the Archive, of which she is the founding director, is engaged with several digitising and research projects and also houses a photographic archive (jointly curated with Siona O’Connell) and the University of Cape Town’s Katrine Harries Print Cabinet (jointly curated with Stephen Inggs).
In 2008, Skotnes curated an exhibition on Cecil Skotnes’s private archive (with Thomas Cartwright) titled Cecil Skotnes: A private view, which was exhibited at the SA National Gallery and the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg.
Other projects have included The Archive of Louis Anthing (2013 –), a transcription on the bones of two giraffes; Lamb of God, an exhibition of three bone books and other work exhibited in Europe (2004) and the United States (2009, accompanied by the artist’s book Book of Iterations); and a permanent 127-cabinet installation for the Origins Museum at the University of the Witwatersrand with Malcolm Payne, titled Double Vision (2006).