Sower in the Field

Mary Sibande is best known for her sculptures and works on paper, which document performances. In these works, Sibande places female domestic workers in roles of power denied to them under apartheid in South Africa. The artist addresses this historical racism through an alter-ego named Sophie, who often appears in textile-based works in one of three colors: red, blue, and purple, each highly symbolic. Although Sower in the Field features Sophie, it is unique in that it is a monumental bronze sculpture. The artist has only made one other large-scale bronze—an uneditioned work featuring a needle component from a sewing machine. Sower in the Field speaks to The Parable of the Sower (sometimes called the Parable of the Soils) found in the Christian Gospels of Matthew 13:1-23, Mark 4:1-20, and Luke 8:4-15. Religion is a motif found throughout Sibande’s work. In the parable, Jesus told a crowd of a farmer who indiscriminately sowed his seeds. Some fell wayside, some on rocky ground, and others on good soil—it is these last seeds that thrive. In religious terms, the seeds were intended to represent the Gospel, and the good soil being those citizens that accept and embrace it. With the 1993 publication of Black American author Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, an Afrofuturist novel in which the author articulated the idea that racism is a necessary foundation for capitalism, the parable has taken on new interpretation as a statement that those individuals that thrive are those raised in a favorable environment, independent of their own worth or integrity.