A warehouse studio in the Woodstock neighborhood of Cape Town is where the tapestries, suspended sculptures, and bejeweled artist books of Igshaan Adams find their form. Here are the materials: Hundreds of spindles of nylon rope and cotton twine in many hues, stacked along the wall as if in some stall deep in a labyrinthine import-export market. Plastic pouches bulging with beads, strung and unstrung, made of wood, glass, plastic, stone, and shell, bringing to mind how Adams likens his compositions to mixing spices. Bundles of fabric, scissored into long, ribbon-like strips, bunched on the floor and edging into the workspace like a multicolored tide.
And here are the people: The team, some twenty strong, is no ordinary roster of assistants. Many are Adams’s family. They include Ursula Alexander and Athlene Dias, his aunts, who when I visited the studio recently were carrying on a lively banter as they stitched. (“They’re the commenters,” Adams quips.) Others are quasi-family, for instance neighbors from Bonteheuwel, the section of the Cape Flats where Adams grew up. He has known Morné Roux, his studio supervisor, since both were five years old. In fact, all the bonds here run deep. Adams met his principal weavers, Phumeza Mgwinteni and Busisa Mahlahla—whom I find perched on a scaffold, operating a room-height loom—some fifteen years ago, when he worked for a nonprofit in the Khayelitsha township. It was there that he himself learned to weave, the better to guide the women there in marketing their craft.
In the studio, I am gripped by a reluctance to take photographs. The inhibition is partly professional—an instinct to protect work in progress and assure the artist that nothing will leak. But something else commands respect here. In addition to all the diligent labor going on, there is the palpable intimacy that flows from these layers of personal connection.
Adams appreciates my deference, but laughs it off. He gets plenty of visitors. With growing art world fame—consecrated by his participation in the 2022 Venice Biennale and 2023 Bienal de São Paulo, among other major international exhibitions—the studio has become its own pilgrimage spot. In fact, he encourages a certain porosity. Twice he has relocated the whole operation into public view, first in 2020 at the A4 Arts Foundation, as part of its Open Production program, and then for seven months in 2022–23 as the atelier artist at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, both in Cape Town. In turn, he has made the front section of his Woodstock studio into a project space, where he invites Cape Town artists to show work unfettered by gallery or institutional strictures.
His, then, is a social practice. He works best, he says, with the team all around, the radio playing, people chatting and teasing. But he will also stay late alone, or retreat home to sketch a new composition or work out some new material experiment with needle and thread. When by himself, he says, distraction and worry lurk. But Adams knows trouble. He grew up amid it; there was a time when he courted it. His art charts a journey into the light that is as personally searing as it is invested with certainty that any safety he achieves must be shared and collective. In his interpretation, the Sufi teaching is clear: It is by serving people that you serve God.
A warehouse studio in the Woodstock neighborhood of Cape Town is where the tapestries, suspended sculptures, and bejeweled artist books of Igshaan Adams find their form. Here are the materials: Hundreds of spindles of nylon rope and cotton twine in many hues, stacked along the wall as if in some stall deep in a labyrinthine import-export market. Plastic pouches bulging with beads, strung and unstrung, made of wood, glass, plastic, stone, and shell, bringing to mind how Adams likens his compositions to mixing spices. Bundles of fabric, scissored into long, ribbon-like strips, bunched on the floor and edging into the workspace like a multicolored tide.
And here are the people: The team, some twenty strong, is no ordinary roster of assistants. Many are Adams’s family. They include Ursula Alexander and Athlene Dias, his aunts, who when I visited the studio recently were carrying on a lively banter as they stitched. (“They’re the commenters,” Adams quips.) Others are quasi-family, for instance neighbors from Bonteheuwel, the section of the Cape Flats where Adams grew up. He has known Morné Roux, his studio supervisor, since both were five years old. In fact, all the bonds here run deep. Adams met his principal weavers, Phumeza Mgwinteni and Busisa Mahlahla—whom I find perched on a scaffold, operating a room-height loom—some fifteen years ago, when he worked for a nonprofit in the Khayelitsha township. It was there that he himself learned to weave, the better to guide the women there in marketing their craft.
In the studio, I am gripped by a reluctance to take photographs. The inhibition is partly professional—an instinct to protect work in progress and assure the artist that nothing will leak. But something else commands respect here. In addition to all the diligent labor going on, there is the palpable intimacy that flows from these layers of personal connection.
Adams appreciates my deference, but laughs it off. He gets plenty of visitors. With growing art world fame—consecrated by his participation in the 2022 Venice Biennale and 2023 Bienal de São Paulo, among other major international exhibitions—the studio has become its own pilgrimage spot. In fact, he encourages a certain porosity. Twice he has relocated the whole operation into public view, first in 2020 at the A4 Arts Foundation, as part of its Open Production program, and then for seven months in 2022–23 as the atelier artist at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, both in Cape Town. In turn, he has made the front section of his Woodstock studio into a project space, where he invites Cape Town artists to show work unfettered by gallery or institutional strictures.
His, then, is a social practice. He works best, he says, with the team all around, the radio playing, people chatting and teasing. But he will also stay late alone, or retreat home to sketch a new composition or work out some new material experiment with needle and thread. When by himself, he says, distraction and worry lurk. But Adams knows trouble. He grew up amid it; there was a time when he courted it. His art charts a journey into the light that is as personally searing as it is invested with certainty that any safety he achieves must be shared and collective. In his interpretation, the Sufi teaching is clear: It is by serving people that you serve God.
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