Durban-born Jo Rogge was mentored and tutored by accomplished fibre artist and teacher Jeanette Gilks during her formative years as a student at Westville Girls’ High School, and later completed a BA (Hons) in visual arts at the University of Kwazulu Natal.

Of the seminal works introduced to Rogge by Gilks during her teaching of art history, the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries (considered one of the great masterpieces of Western art), held at the Musee de Cluny in Paris, have fired the artist’s imagination and research over an extended period.These six tapestries, woven in around 1500, represent the five senses against a detailed red background, representing touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight and the sixth, a mystery.

Rogge has for many years harboured the vision to recreate these tapestries in a decolonized African context, replacing European iconography with African symbolism, with additional reference to the current climate crisis, and the disordering of the complex internal universe of the five senses through a queer lens.

“The Lady and The Unicorn tapestries offer an opportunity to confront how different forms of understanding and experience overlap to form beliefs, shape perspectives, and precipitate action.” Mark De Vitis, Lecturer in Art History , University of Sydney.

Made collaboratively, these tapestries are the starting point for a series of large-scale and smaller artworks, as well as process documentation, with both artists considering and reinterpreting the originals, against their own personal contexts and lived realities.

Rogge’s current research is centred on the deep spiritual and cultural ties between diverse indigenous cultures and the avian world. Viewed as sacred beings, birds hold a valued place in the traditional ecological knowledge system of these communities. Aspects of this research will be incorporated into the envisaged ‘tapestries’, as well as individual works, including a multimedia installation.

Gilks’ continuous drawing practice, concerns around climate change and works from her personal archive are to be interwoven into the exhibition as a whole.