Silk Roots: Following the thread

An influential part of modern consumer culture has become preoccupied with the origins and history of the things we consume.

From where is our coffee sourced? Is it Fair Trade? We want to know because to the untrained eye, most of the things we buy don't betray much about the conditions in which they were made or the economic tides that brought them to us.

Yet the things we buy have a history, they're part of an economic system that shapes our lives, they were made with natural resources or processes that affect other people and the environment. There's morality in objects and materials.

All four artists participating in Materiality - Stephan Erasmus, Mandy Coppes-Martin, Mandy Johnston and Dirk Bahmann - showing at Lizamore and Associates, engage on one level or another with the question of the political, moral, economic and historical aspects of their materials.

As a relative newcomer, Coppes-Martin, particularly, has grabbed the art world's attention, especially with her innovative floating drawings in raw silk thread. (She was runner-up at the 2012 Sasol New Signature awards, and had her first solo exhibition late last year to critical and commercial success.) Her choice of silk has its creative origins in her interest in the famous Silk Road, which over millennia opened up trade routes throughout the East and a passage between East and West. Silk was central to the formation of many civilisations, not to mention global economies.

The question she runs up against is how to set her artistic material into a dialogue with its own history. The delicacy of Coppes-Martin's silk figures suggest at once fragility and strength. Its threads might be interpreted as complex connections and tangled networks, and evoke the ways in which these relationships constitute us. The forms' empty bellies might hint at the destruction and barrenness of the silk trade, and by implication global capitalism.

But the difficulty of reading the history of the material in the material itself is part of the meaning, too. After all, these works constitute a poetic, not a didactic engagement with their materials.

Coppes-Martin takes environmental questions seriously, but these works are not meant to be preachy. Rather, they bring the material full circle, speaking of the world they created.

• See Coppes-Martin's latest work at the group exhibition Materiality at Lizamore and Associates, 142 Jan Smuts Avenue, Johannesburg, until September 27