The Art of Discard

Fragments stitched together.
Waste turned into witness.

Studio Niemand

Jackie Niemand

Based in St. Helena Bay on South Africa’s West Coast, Jackie Niemand is an emerging artist working in monochrome and mixed media.
Her layered abstractions - stitched, torn, reassembled - are a quiet rebellion against waste, silence, and forgetting.

LATEST SERIES:

Counting the Cormorants

A meditation on visibility, fragility and what escapes being counted.

SEE LATEST WORK

Every torn edge or frayed thread is deliberate.
They speak.

The Art

of Discard

I’m fascinated by how quickly we discard—objects, emotions, places, even people.

My practice, The Art of Discard, responds to this disposability. I collect what’s been tossed aside: forgotten fabrics, everyday packaging, ideas dismissed or ignored. I reuse because I must. Childhood abandonment left me with an overflowing need to comfort what’s been left behind.

Every work begins with fragments. Every stitch is a refusal to throw away.

Wild beauty and human disruption.
I’m not trying to resolve it - only to honour it.

Steeped in

Rugged Beauty

The West Coast is both wild and worn - harsh, picturesque, distressed.
St. Helena Bay, where I live and work, is my quiet refuge. A place of industrial noise and natural whispers.

Fishing boats. Derelict buildings. Salt spray and stillness.
The contradictions here run deep: beauty and decay, wealth and neglect, silence and reverberation.

This environment has become part of my work - its messiness, its textures, its imperfect truth.