Robert Hamblin | Queer Cartographies

Robert Hamblin | Queer Cartographies
Robert Hamblin (1969) is an artist, father, and a gender activist born in Johannesburg South Africa. He lives and works in Cape Town. Hamblin’s paintings and photographic works have been exhibited in South Africa and internationally. The artist has received critical acclaim for his work that contributes to debates around the body politics of our time. Hamblin's work is concerned with issues of queer masculinity as a transgender person. He transitioned from queer female in apartheid-era South Africa to transgender male after the fall of the apartheid government. His perspectives of coming into white maleness in such a critical time is visited in his work. He has no tertiary education other than his experiences in Apartheid-era as a photojournalist, his subsequent work in South African theatre as a publicity photographer and thereafter twenty years of mentorship with 1952 Académie Ranson abstract painter Nel Erasmus. Erasmus continually encouraged him to abandon photography in favour of the freedom of paint. This persuasion took twenty years only materialising in 2020. During the twenty years, he produced several bodies of fine art photography. His last body of photographic work was a seven-year project with black transgender sex workers and culminated in a large solo exhibition at The Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town. In the three following years, he dedicated himself to writing a commissioned memoir that launched online earlier this month and at Nel gallery in Long Street in Cape Town on the 22nd of June. “Writing a memoir is a very exposing exercise. One is confronted with the tenuous nature of memory and truth and forced to choose a single storyline in one’s life that will feel succinct to a reader. This is a jarring process that made me long for the dualities that are able to exist in visual art practice. I landed in a cul de sac with my photography practice though. I found myself in the year of isolation - Covid 19." In South Africa’s first major lockdown he started painting with inks belonging to his first-grader daughter and experimenting with the effects of bleach on different kinds of inks. All of them had varying degrees of resilience to the oxidation and separation which the bleach imposes between the pigments and solubles of the inks.

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