Strauss & co - Wits Art Museum

20 WITS ARTS MUSEUM ENDOWMENT AUCTION 10 Kathryn Smith (b.1975) Benoni 29 July 2011 Pigment print on 315 gsm Innova 100% cotton paper 52 x 78 cm 2/5 Edition 5 +1 AP 2012 Donated by the artist R5 000 – 7 000 This work was first exhibited as part of an installation entitled Incident Room: Jacoba ‘Bubbles’ Schroeder 1949-2012 . It included published and other ephemera about the circumstances of the death of Schroeder, a young working class woman, whose body was found in a park in the Johannesburg northern suburbs in August 1949. She had spent the previous evening with at least two high profile wealthy young men. No conviction for the murder was ever secured. This image records Smith’s visit to discover Schroeder’s previously unmarked grave. It skillfully communicates the fragility of the record of Schroeder’s existence and the artist’s quest to ‘burrow beneath the myth of Bubbles and find Jacoba, to reinscribe her subjectivity, dignity and her memory’. Smith has an abiding interest in forensic investigation and is currently completing an MSc (Forensic Art) at the University of Dundee, Scotland.  LSC