Brigitta Gaylard

About
Brigitta

Brigitta Gaylard was born in Pretoria in December 1968 and schooled at Northlands Girls’ High, matriculating in 1986 with the May Gardyne Memorial Trophy & the Adeline Slatter Memorial Trophy for excelling in English & Afrikaans respectively, and a placing of 12th nationally for the Anglo-De Beers English Olympiad. We mention this because poetry and literature was her first love, language came before pictures, and it has never left the pictures. From there she went to the UKZN PMB for a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts, graduating in 1990 and reaching the semi-finals of the Swan Young Artist Award in the same year, and then to the Durban campus, where she took a Higher Education Diploma in 1991. She is a Christian first, which is less a biographical footnote than the reason she has always been more interested in what a picture is for, than in what it is worth. Relationships, connection, community, Gender Studies, Human Rights and Eco-awareness have been themes running through her practice.

Her first working years established a habit she has never broken: she builds things rather than inherits them. In 1992 she was handed the art department at Northlands, her own old school. The department needed rebuilding from the floor up, so she rebuilt it, bringing in audiovisual media for the history of art and introducing printmaking, sculpture and photography alongside painting on the practical side. In 1994 she turned that work outward, presenting “Learning Through Looking”, a workshop and seminar on the styles of architecture in Durban, to the art teachers of the KZN Education Department, and in July 1995 Alan Powers invited her to present at the World Congress of Art Deco.

Between those two things she did what she still calls the most useful thing she has ever done for her eye: she spent a year in the United States and toured twenty-four thousand miles of it in a van on a photographic expedition. On her return, she took over Maris Stella’s art department to do it all again from scratch.

Photography has been her constant discipline. She ran a photographic business, Wavelength Productions, from 1999 to 2007, and the same period was her densest as an exhibiting artist. She showed at New Signatures at the KZNSA Gallery in 1991, at the Durban Arts Festival at the Cecil Renaud Gallery in 1993 and 1994, and at the Volkskas Atelier in 1994. In 1999 she held her solo exhibition, Vinyl Diamonds, at Red Eye @rt in the Durban Art Gallery, exhibited Blur with Langa Magwa and Kevin Payne at the KZNSA Gallery, took part in the Past Graduate exhibition at the Jack Heath Gallery in Pietermaritzburg, hung work twice under A Public Hanging of Thumbnails, showed with 3 Durban Photographers at Wicked Pixels in Cape Town, and produced and directed a sixteen millimetre music piece, Alien’s Flamenco. In 2005, the year the work travelled furthest, she was in the Cape Town Month of Photography twice over, in “Girls Night Out” at the Joao Ferreira Gallery, curated by Tracy Gander, and in “Sex, Love and Suicide” at the Shot Gallery, curated by Tamlyn Martin, as well as in Paper-Works at the NSA and in Red Eye Intersect and Red Eye Meets DCC25 Urban Edge.

Publications and reviews followed the work: the Swan Young Artists Award catalogue in 1990, Collaborations: A Book of South African Art and Poetry in 1999, 100XC: Photography in South Africa from UCT Press in the same year, the Cape Town Month of Photography catalogue and Art South Africa in 2005, and Sandra Klopper’s review of Girls’ Night Out and Sweet Nothings.

She has never been able to keep disciplines apart, and she stopped trying a long time ago. “Only Carbon Arrows and Bullet Points: the Target Series”, shown at Bean Bag Bohemia in Morningside in 2005, was photography and oil painting together with beadwork made to her designs by the beaders of St Agnes Anglican Church in Kloof, and it set the pattern for most of what has followed: she designs, and she makes with other people. That has since meant a ceramics collaboration with Sandile Cele in 2022, Family Ties with John Henry Janse van Rensberg in 2025, and Sketch Warz with Nivesh Rawanthal, Warren Raysdorf and Dusty Rich in 2011. Drawing remains the spine underneath all of it.

The years her children were born sit on the same list as the exhibitions, and belong there: Jasper in 2000, Cassidy in 2003. She spent 2001 managing Jasper’s fourteen television commercials as the Mica Hardware baby, and attended the SASC Motion Picture Workshop the same year as a delegate on Garth Taylor’s music video “Why?”, where she was named Kodak Top Student on the workshop.

Design at scale came through events and clothing. She designed Arabian Nights in 2009, Crystal Pumpkin in 2010, Secret Garden in 2011 and Starry Nights in 2012, alongside the Eden Eccentric Events that ran with them. The fashion work began with the Blanket Jackets in 2010 and went on to Eden’s Eco Fresh Fest show in 2014 and the Rescue Me show in 2016, a fundraiser for Lifesaving South Africa. Her fullest collection was Afrofuturism in 2019, which fused nineteen-fifties European patterns from her mother’s collection with the African pinafore, imported Indian beaded panels and knitted shawls by Mary-Ann Geary, (the Witty Knitter), working with hoodies, ruching, full circle skirts and boob tubes. In 2020 she made the Flex Dress, one travelling dress designed to be worn many different ways; its show was cancelled by lockdown, and she and her schoolchildren made Lockdown Artworks instead.

Teaching has been the other half of the practice rather than an interruption to it. Her learners excelled: Simran Singh was the only South African chosen for the Association of Women World Leaders of Monaco exhibition “Draw me a World”, whose book was presented to Prince Albert II and Princess Stephanie of Monaco; Dorina Cherneva’s work won the MathArt competition and toured to Linz in Austria; Kamira Naidoo’s writing was published in Jonathan Jansen and Emily O’Ryan’s “Learning Under Lockdown: Voices of South Africa’s Children”. She took Eden’s work to the KZNSA Gallery for Human Rights Day, and she used the gallery for the argument as well as the art, in the 2016 Gender Schools exhibition challenging every school to become a gender equal school, the Red My Lips campaign and Jan Jordaan’s human rights workshop.

In 2016 she ran Eden’s overseas cultural tours, taking learners around the Baltic by cruise liner through six capital cities, and in 2018 she took 18 learners to the Ambassadors Leaders Conference at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Boston.

Along the way she qualified as a yoga instructor in 2005 and took TEFL and TESOL certification in 2020, and she holds the Estate Agents Board certification as an immovable property specialist, from 1993, a stranger qualification than it looks for someone whose first public lecture was about the architecture of a city.

She lives in Fish Hoek and works from the Cape. The recent pictures are the Harbour Photos and Still Lifes of 2025 and the Nature Photos of 2026, and in 2026 she qualified as a CATHSSETA accredited National Cultural Tourist Guide for Gauteng, the Western Cape and Mpumalanga, registered as a visual art, design, architecture and wellness specialist. That accreditation is the formal name for something she has been doing for thirty-five years without one: standing in front of a building, an object or a picture with other people, and teaching them to look at it. She is a photographer, a painter, a draughtswoman, a ceramicist, an event designer and a designer of clothes, and the reason the list is that long is that every one of those skills taught her something the others could not. What she brings to a room, a residency or a tour is a long, trained, patient eye, and the conviction that looking properly at a made thing is a skill worth sharing.