Fragments stitched together.
Waste turned into witness.
The Art of Discard
Studio Niemand
Based in St. Helena Bay on South Africa’s West Coast and working under the name Studio Niemand, Jackie Niemand is a conceptual artist mostly working in monochrome 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.
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. My work is also shaped by early experiences of abandonment, which left me with a deep instinct to comfort and repair rather than discard.
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.

