Arts Thread

Jane Rigava
BA visual arts (fine arts)

Stellenbosch University

Graduates: 2025

Specialisms: Fine Art / Contemporary Craft / Textiles - Mixed Media

My location: Windhoek, Namibia

jane-rigava ArtsThread Profile
Stellenbosch University

Jane Rigava

jane-rigava ArtsThread Profile

First Name: Jane

Last Name: Rigava

University / College: Stellenbosch University

Course / Program: BA visual arts (fine arts)

Graduates: 2025

Specialisms: Fine Art / Contemporary Craft / Textiles - Mixed Media

My Location: Windhoek, Namibia

About

My practice is a wordless dialogue between my anatomical body and the cadaver; an encounter with the post-mortem body as a partner in conversation about mortality, care, and intimacy, conducted through craft. Where the post-mortem body has long been rendered spectacle, I offer touch instead. Crochet, needle-felting, and fabric manipulation replace the clinical gaze with a crafter's gaze, one that holds rather than inspects. My techniques also echo the logic of medical imaging such as a grid built stitch by stitch and a surface pierced and repaired.My work sits at the meeting point of two lineages: the body measured and modelled by machines, and the body clothed and repaired by cloth. The labour is slow, tactile, and physically demanding. That labour is the point, an embodied exchange between the body I inhabit and the one I re-present. Ultimately, my work resists full legibility. It asks to be felt more than seen, offering the body a right to remain partially unknown, even as it is touched and held.

Needle felting builds form through repeated puncture with many small stabs compacting loose fibre into density. There’s an obvious, almost uncomfortable parallel to the body itself: tissue built up through repetition, felted into being. I’ve been thinking here with Louise Bourgeois’s soft books with the way she used textile as a vessel for memory and the body’s interior. Photographed from the side, the book’s pages stack like skin in cross-section: layer on layer, exactly the kind of slice the Visible Human Project offers, but soft, warm, and made by hand