BIOGRAPHY OF THE ARTIST
Odette Graskie (b. 1993) is a contemporary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. She works with paper, artists’ books, and drawing. Her artworks investigate play, intimacy and affective connection. Most recently Graskie exhibited the solo show Side Quest at Berman Contemporary, as well as Drawing as Movement at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival in Oudtshoorn, South Africa. In 2023, Graskie completed her MA in Visual Arts with the University of Johannesburg, culminating in her solo exhibition a line, a thread, a conversation at Berman Contemporary. The focus of her dissertation explores the relationship between sitter, artist and artwork in an interventive portraiture practice. Graskie is a Junior Bookbinder at Pulp Paperworks and is represented by Berman Contemporary in Johannesburg.
She has participated in artist residencies locally as well as internationally. Her recent group exhibitions include Pretty Brilliant and ARTladies at Berman Contemporary; ellipsis: approximations to a voice at the University of the Free State Art Gallery in Bloemfontein; and The order of the drawing exhibition with the Drawing Research Network at the University of Loughborough, UK. She took part in the 2022 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London and the 2024 Investec Cape Town Art Fair.
A STUDIO VISIT WITH THE ARTIST
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Working with drawing, installation and paper, I create line-drawn portrait-worlds, wherein the faces of real people (who have given permission and were involved in the agentic qualities of their portraits) become enmeshed and intertwined with each other. These portrait-worlds have become the language of my own emotive expression, a psychogeographic mapping of an inner world. At the same time, I attempt to create artworks that evoke a response in the viewer – whether that is emotional or in their willingness to interact with a work.
I collect these portraits through interactive drawing performance, where I converse with subjects and get to know them very briefly. These interactions are multisensorial, and the conversation and other sensory information blend with the visual to create an intimate and emotionally loaded drawing. These drawings then are reused and redrawn, becoming paper sculptures and installation.
In the redrawing, I explore paper and its many expressive qualities in my practice. Paper is not only a backdrop for my drawings, but rather a means of questioning and experimenting with my psychogeographic world and how it can take shape and become interactive. The fibrous quality of paper (the way it is a universe of matter in itself), as well as the tactility, versatility and lightness all become another object of feeling in my work. When used in installation and three-dimensional work, paper relays the information in the work through its physical presence. Creating paper worlds, I invite viewers to step-into, look-through and become a part of the world of portraits. Intimacy and emotionality are embedded in the artworks, and the viewer is often given hints into understanding this with use of words and with play.
My most recent work included a series of performative Drawing Sessions, wherein I invited the public to become sitters for my drawings. I asked sitters to make rules and thereby create ripples of affect and their own agency in the work. In the immersive sculptural installation, Threads of Connection, I reworked the emotional and affective content of the Drawing Sessions. The installation altered the gallery space by inviting viewers to laugh, cry, lie on the floor, and daydream. The space shifted into a space of play. I also created portraits of viewers, and they asserted their agency in the outcome of the installation by placing these portraits in the installation.
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