Luan Nel on Robert Hamblin

Robert Hamblin was invited to participate in Nel’s Summer Salon 2020/21. I had known Robert for three decades. We both grew up in Alberton, an industrial town immediately south of Johannesburg. My best friend from the age of sixteen was Brian Webber. Brian, was a year older than me and we met at Die Kruin, School for the arts, in Parktown. He is also from Alberton and joined the arts school in Standard 9, I joined at the same time but I was in Standard 8. I started my high school at HTS Marais Viljoen in Alberton and he started at Hoerskool Alberton where he had a girlfriend, her name was Adele and she was a year or two older than him. Brian and Adele kept close contact. This was how I met Adele, now Robert.

As the years went on I was kept abreast of Adele’s life and booming career as a journalistic photographer by Brian. She was a brilliant photographer and knew absolutely everybody in the news and entertainment field. On a first-name basis with the likes of Amanda Strydom (one of Brian and my icons) Sandra Prinsloo (another diamond) and so the list went on and on, we were totally in awe. To us, Adele was an example, somebody to admire and applaud. She was one of us creative types from a small big town and her field of creativity, photography was her ticket out of that rugby-crazy, sport-obsessed, industrial hellhole that we called Alberton. Thinking, If Adele could do it then so can we.

About ten years later I met up with Adele again when she lived in Parkhurst with her then-girlfriend, who had been friends with my mom after the divorce. Neil and I had dinner at their place and it was great to reconnect. Shortly after that, I left for Amsterdam where I spent two years at the Rijksakademie. When I returned, I had lost contact with Adele and some years went by. I heard from Brian that Adele preferred to be called Robert and is transitioning. The first person we personally knew to go through with such a metamorphosis and taking such incredibly brave leaps into the unknown. I saw Robert at a restaurant/bar in Greenside but think he either ignored me or didn’t see me. Yet he stared straight into my eyes. He had a beard, maybe he didn’t want to be recognized. I was with Neil. Perhaps I was a reminder of a life he needed to separate from? I am unsure. I think that is how I read it and I wasn’t hurt. It was more Brian’s ex-girlfriend than my closest trans person. I left it at that.

Our paths did not cross again until 2013. I was Young Curator for the Aardklop Arts Festival and whilst installing the large group exhibition, Weather Report, I discovered Robert was one of the participating solo artists of the festival. I knew he was now Robert but did not know he had turned artist, as in Fine Art Photography. And from the second we laid eyes on each other at Potch University we connected properly again. He called me his ‘homie’ which was slightly outside my way of using slang, but I accepted it sounded cool to him. I reckoned us both being from Albuurrrton and all gave it a degree of validity. I was quietly and silently bowled over by the physical transformation he had undergone. It was not a case of ‘passing’… no, it was a case of a very sexy man calling me homie like it is the most natural thing in the world. This butch straight male bonding I had little access to throughout my life, either because of my own fears or because I simply never accessed it when I even dared venture such closeness. Perhaps my sexuality stood in the way… (it probably did)

?

Robert has always loved my painting, I discovered. I loved his photography which I found very distilled, pristine in an almost Mapplethorpe kind of way. This all changed somewhat in a very powerful series of portraiture he did with black transgender sex workers. This was the first major series of Robert’s new work I had seen. It was shown in a hall on the UCT campus. I usually have trouble with work that involves looking at the identity of any distinct section of society that can be described as vulnerable by people from outside the subject or group. It was Robert after all, so decided to attend a viewing and tried keeping an open mind. Robert did this difficult terrain justice. He spent the best part of seven years within this project, with the subjects and played an active part within their movement toward recognition and cause. He knew them personally and did in fact have their consent in taking their likenesses. And what was presented was so gentle, sensitive, empathetic, it totally drew me in. Of course. Robert was no alien to the world of being transgender himself and I do believe this subjectivity played positively into the project. It was in my mind a groundbreaking body of work that leads the viewer to a path empathetic and not at all to the dead-end that is curiosity. This is a near absent quality in most of the ‘art’ in the field currently available. Robert as an artist just stepped onto another level in my regard. Here is a new artist with a lot of personal experience, technical skill beyond the abilities of most fine artists, and a unique ear for the nuances within a narrative. ?

The next time Robert and I had an Art-Connection was when he invited me to collaborate with him on one of his ongoing projects which sees the sitter (me in this case) being covered in white clay, dressed minimally, then being photographed whilst in movement. I saw some of the other people with whom he had done such collaborations’ resulting images and it looked very powerful, kind of scary, it looked like the work of Satan himself. It also reminded me of an incredible exhibition I saw at the Guggenheim some years earlier called The Craymaster Series. It had the same texture and tonality and even visual appearances. I think it left one slightly suspended in a space we all have inside us but rarely access. For a copy from this collaboration, I insisted we swap work. We were both pleased with this barter. ??????

Some years later I own this gallery, Nel, which was started shortly before COVID19 HIT South Africa. I invite Robert to participate in one of our few group exhibitions. It was the Summer Salon. Once again we had not seen ach other in a while and I have not kept abreast with his work output. ???

He delivered the work, I later opened it up and there it was, to my utter surprise, painting.

This guy continues to be an astronaut, an explorer and adventurer, stepping in any new way of being, working in any medium that he deems necessary for work, in order to find the authentic self and the truest self-expression. ?

Robert asked if I would do a chat or interview with him at the opening which is also the launch of his memoir. This in front of a small group of invited guests due to COVID protocols and bearing in mind social distancing. I agreed and this was where we left it. Until Friday, when we decided to add a slightly performative element to the presentation. Robert asked I manifest as either one of my stock characters (I perform what is sometimes called Gorilla Drag. I would simply appear unexpectedly at an event as some famous or infamous celebrity. I am most known for manifesting as Donatella Visagie (a play on Versace) and it has become an aspect of my oeuvre I enjoy and has its audience. I agreed but Robert insisted it be a local celebrity, one from our hood, the south of Johannesburg, and so he asked I manifest as Patricia Lewis. The dynamic pop singer and TV presenter who made massive hits in the 90s. I agreed. And it felt like home.?

Luan Nel July 2021