INTERVIEW: Adele Van Heerden by Anna Rotty

Adele Van Heerden’s work has a way of activating the senses. Sitting with Adele’s A La Piscine project, I see light refracting in contained bodies of water, ready for the diver’s wake. I hear stillness, and the potential to muffle our stream of constant thoughts. Meeting over Zoom, I was able to see the scale of Adele’s layered paintings of pools surrounding her. Her fascination with the visceral and visual experience of these spaces radiates through her studio, enveloping us in interior landscapes. A series of orderly oases among the banal invite us to plunge in and consider how free time is spent and where leisure overlaps with the essentials of life. It was a pleasure to talk to Adele about these comforting meditations on light, water, and ritual.

Anna Rotty: I’d love to start by hearing a bit about where you are and what you’ve been working on. I understand you just got back from a residency. What was that like?

Adele Van Heerden: I'm living in Cape Town, South Africa, where I’ve lived my entire life. Cape Town is a beautiful city at the tip of South Africa where you're never far away from the ocean or the mountains, so we’re blessed to have a lot of beautiful natural landscapes around. My work is very much about different locations – right now, they're about waterscapes.

My residency in France was all about swimming pools in Paris. I was really into the water reflections and sort of looking through the water, seeing what's underneath, seeing the light. There are about 40 pools in Paris and I only got to about a third of them, so I'm looking for opportunities to go back and continue working on that project.

*Long Street Baths Reflections*, Colour Pencil and Gouache on Film, 29x 42cm, 2023.

AR: What’s your relationship to swimming, and pools in particular?

AVH: My journey with swimming started in 2021. Before that, I was into hiking and trail running and mountain-based activities. Then I injured my hip, and my doctor told me I couldn’t do those things anymore. He recommended swimming as rehabilitation. So I started spending a lot of time at the ocean and at swimming pools. That's kind of where my obsession with water came from.

From there, I started doing quite a bit of research into the importance of swimming pools for community and this idea of social infrastructure and what that means in an urban environment. A lot of my research was around pools being a democratic space. When you have your swimming gear on, it flattens everything. There's no real hierarchy anymore. Everyone wants the same thing, which is a safe place to swim.

I started looking at the dynamics between swimming in the ocean and lakes and natural bodies of water versus artificial environments where you're always swimming according to rules – open hours, swimming in lanes, what you can wear, etc. There’s so much you can delve into with regards to architecture, and what that says about the time that the pool was built. In Paris, some of the pools are named after swimming figures in French history, like Alfred Nakache and Suzanne Berlioux. In Cape Town, our public swimming pools were built during the art deco period, plus a little bit of Edwardian architecture. But it's very much in line with what was happening in the UK with lido culture, which was kind of popping off around that time as well in South Africa, it being a British colony at the time.

*Butte Aux Cailles Interior,* Crayon and Gouache on Film, 84x1189, 2023

AR: That’s interesting to think about the landscape of natural bodies of water versus the built architecture of leisure. Have you noticed anything about how we navigate natural versus municipal spaces?

AVH: Swimming in the wild, you're at the mercy of Mother Nature. The conditions can be so different from day to day. The tides can be crazy, the swell can be crazy. There are other creatures in the ocean with you. The ground might be slimy or there might be algae. You just have to see what it's like on any given day. In Cape Town, we get freezing water straight from the Benguela current. It takes some getting used to.

A swimming pool is contained. It’s sanitized. There are lifeguards around. It’s consistent and reliable. It's kind of like a womb, in a way, because it’s like bath water, and depending on the light conditions, if it's an interior pool, the lights can be kind of warm and low-lit. It’s definitely a healing space for me. It calms the parasympathetic nervous system.

*Piscine Butte Aux Cailles Exterior*, Crayon and Gouache on Film, 84x118cm, 2023

AR: I’ve heard you describe swimming as recreation, which brings to mind the idea of water as a basic necessity. We conceive of water as something we all need to survive, which it is. But when we swim, it’s also, as you put it, a source of recreation, which I think is also really valuable and necessary.

AVH: I was recently reading an article about the birth of lido culture in England, a public health movement that turned into spending time at public pools for leisure. What was typically reserved for the upper class was now something to be experienced by everyone. The word 'lido” derived from an island in the Venice Lagoon where European elites bathed in the 19th century. Local municipalities in the UK were encouraged to build lidos as a matter of national importance and as a result hundreds of pools were built across England in the 1920's and 1930's.

I’m fascinated by the rise of the leisure class and people having more time for leisure and recreation and how when the Industrial Revolution was winding down, people had more time to spend in the outdoors and focus on health. I think swimming pool culture was very much on the rise when that was happening. It speaks to the importance of social infrastructure and people having places to gather for non-commercial reasons.

Social infrastructure can be anything. It can be a shopping center, a park, or museum. It can be certain kinds of bars – a gay bar is a type of social infrastructure. Again, these places are really democratic, and swimming pools are one of the best examples. They’re places where people can move their bodies and be in the moment.

But when we talk about water as a basic necessity, that forces us to engage with some big environmental issues. In Sub-Saharan Africa, we're experiencing less and less rainfall every year. Desertification is very much an issue that we're going to be dealing with in the future. That brings up all these questions around the practice of keeping private swimming pools. They are just so water-intensive. And it shines a light on the class disparity between who gets to have access to water and who doesn’t.

*Alfred Nakache Pool*, Crayon and Gouache on Film, 42x60cm, 2023.

AR: True, living in New Mexico I’m no stranger to disappearing water, unfortunately. Can you share a bit about your process and material choices?

AVH: I work on drafting film, which is a poly-based paper that’s actually used a lot in architectural projects. It's a partially translucent film with a kind of multi-opacity. I'll usually start with a pastel or charcoal drawing on one side of the film. This is where I do the line work, with the structure and the composition. And then I’ll turn the work around and work on the reverse side with paint such as gouache and acrylic to add the color and the body of the work. Last, I turn it around again so that the final work you’re seeing is the color sort of transferring through the film.

It’s a kind of reverse painting technique I developed about three or four years ago. I find it really activates the materiality of the film. It’s also been interesting to see how a lot of the work I make on this architectural film actually shows architectural spaces, like pools.

*Unreliable Narrator*, Pastel and Gouache on Film, 84x118cm, 2023

*Victoria Yards Vertical Garden*, Ink and Gouache on Film, 59x42cm, 2022

AR: Your use of material reminds me of how we experience seeing light refract through water. You're catching ink or charcoal on one side, and using this kind of blueprint on the other. The pools make so much sense on this material, but you’ve also produced some great work of museum spaces as well, which also engage with containing light in an interesting way. Both are controlled spaces where the temperature and humidity are very particular, and often where people experience “free” time. Do you see these two bodies of work intersecting at all?

AVH: Yes, exactly. Taking care of collections, especially involving organic matter like ancient animal specimens, the temperature and the light have to be consistent. That’s where I see a parallel to pools, where the water has to be kept at a certain pH, the chlorine has to be just right, the temperature is tightly controlled.

I did an honors in curatorship program with the Center for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town in 2015, and ended up spending a lot of time in museums and working with museum collections and learning about the curatorial field. While there, I had some experience working with Iziko museum collections and archives, researching, writing about them and especially becoming quite obsessed with the role of curiosity cabinets within the museum and pedagogical systems. It got me thinking about museums as a colonial idea. When you go to the British Museum or the Museum of Natural History, they’re these great places for specimens and knowledge, but kings and rulers kind of had their own private museums in their palaces where they collected exotic things from other lands.

Still, I just love museums. They can be so wonderfully weird. I love when a museum is a bit dated, and you can see how they classified things in the past versus how we would present something now.

Now that I think of it, greenhouses are another controlled space that I make a point of visiting whenever I’m in a new city. European gardeners had to design and build greenhouses that could approximate the climates of steamy jungles or dry deserts. Plants described as “wild” and “exotic” were domesticated in potting soil and glass enclosures. People flocked from all over to see these symbols of life in other lands in a safe environment. Botanical gardens became known as imperial theme parks, demonstrating conquest and control, showcasing the reach and power of empire.

*Amniotic*, Pastel and Gouache on Film, 84x118cm, 2023.

AR: Tell me about the environment where you’ve honed these interests. People often see artists as individual producers of work, but obviously community is such an important part of what we do. What does community look like for you in Cape Town?

AVH: The Cape Town art scene is very alive, very prolific. We have an art fair every year in February. I'm part of a collective in Cape Town called Sidetrack Studio. We're about 20 different artists and we each have a little lock-up-and-go space. Some of these artists I've known for years, and we've kind of been traveling together. We were at another studio together called Eastside, and before that we were at a studio in town called Untitled.

It's great to have a team or a collective of other artists that you can ask for help or advice when you need it. We do an open studio exhibition twice a year now, which is also super great. It's nice to have visitors in the space. Over time, some people have left the collective and others have joined, but overall the family has grown.

AR: Thank you for sharing your stunning work and thoughts with me, Adele. I would love to invite you out to New Mexico sometime and see what you might paint.