Chloë Hugo-Hamman is an artist and teacher who lives and works in Cape Town. She works across drawing, textiles, and sculpture. Her practice explores how systems of classification within mental health shape understandings of the body through textiles and clothing. Working with soft materials and fabric scraps, she creates tactile works that sit between garment, object, and body.
Through slow, repetitive processes of hand-stitching, layering, mending, and stuffing she investigates ideas of vulnerability, protection, discomfort, and transformation, considering the relationship between internal psychological experience and the social structures that influence it.
She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Cape Town, a Master of Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Education from the University of Cape Town.
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Speaking in Dream 2021
TMRW Gallery
Johannesburg
As someone who suffers from ADD, anxiety and depression, I’m on a lot of medication. One of the side effects is vivid dreaming. This side effect reflects the way the medical-industrial complex manipulates people and their ‘illness’. However, I’m wondering if this vivid dreaming could be seen as unintended consequence, allowing me to find a place for myself, counter to the aim of the medicine. The medication wants me to fit into the world whereas perhaps the combination of medications I’m on is opening other worlds to me and making me imagine a world in which people don’t have to fit it.
It’s as though I live in two worlds. These two experiences make me think about the connections between dreaming when you sleep and the dreams you hold for your life and the world, and of a collective dreaming for more liveable futures.
