1987–present
Lady Skollie
Lady Skollie, whose real name is Laura Windvogel, was born in Cape Town and works with themes of desire, consent and sexuality in contemporary South Africa. Her pseudonym alludes to a colonial word that white people used for Black people they called “untrustworthy”. She has exhibited in Johannesburg, Cape Town and London, won the FNB Art Prize in 2020 and was named Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year in 2022.
Biography
The pseudonym “Skollie” comes from the language of the colonial era. The word came from Dutch speech in South Africa, and white people used it of Black people whom they distrusted or considered to come from “undesirable” communities. The artist, born Laura Windvogel in 1987, made it part of her name and her stage persona.
Through this persona she speaks about what is hard to say directly.
Her art education began in childhood, when her mother enrolled her at the Frank Joubert Art Centre in Cape Town (later renamed the Peter Clarke Art Centre). In 2009 she graduated from the University of Cape Town with a BA in history and art within Dutch literature, and in 2014 she received a certificate in business acumen for artists from the university’s Graduate School of Business. Her classical training did not lead her into the traditional art scene: she began promoting her work through social media, and, to my mind, that decision did much to shape her early success. The main themes of her work are gender, desire, sex and sexuality, intimacy and consent in South Africa. She works in ink, brightly coloured watercolour and graphite. Her female figures are simplified and emphatically physical; they are described as a tribute to Khoikhoi women. At first glance they are generous and sensual, but in exhibitions and interviews the subject is violence in a patriarchal society that disregards women’s desire and consent. This is the critics’ reading, and the artist herself might put it differently.
The exhibitions came one after another. In 2014 the Association for Visual Arts Gallery in Cape Town held “Skattie Celebrates Laura Windvogel”. In 2015 she showed “Vroeg Ryp, Vroeg Vrot” at the Stevenson Gallery in Johannesburg, “Ask for what you want” at the WorldArt Gallery in Cape Town and “The only reason” in the Stevenson Gallery’s RAMP project. In 2016 “Hottentot Skollie” was shown at the Cape Town Art Fair in the special project “Tomorrows/Today”, curated by Azu Nwabogu and Ruth Simbao; in the same year the Stevenson Gallery in Johannesburg held the exhibition “SEX”. In 2017 the Tyburn Gallery in London showed “Lust Politics”, and in November of that year “The Mating Dance” was shown in Paris at the Also Known As Africa (AKAA) fair. Later came “Good & Evil” (Circa, Johannesburg, 2019), “Bound” (Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg, 2020) and “A prediction” (Everard Read Gallery, 2021).
In 2020 she won the tenth FNB Art Prize, and also played Safiya Sono, the heroine’s mother, in the first South African Netflix series, “Queen Sono”. In 2022 she was named Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year. She was also commissioned to design a circulation five-rand coin for the South African government.
She also hosted a podcast, “Kiss and Tell”, on Assembly Radio, an internet radio station in Cape Town.
Profile notes