Blanché
Fisher
Forty years of looking closely at the Eastern Cape coast, and making things from what it leaves behind. Shells, sea sand, driftwood, grass and discarded fabric become paintings, sculpture and objects for daily life.
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Everything I pick up, I try to make or build something from.
Blanché Fisher works across painting, sculpture, applied art and functional objects. Her practice begins with close looking and a belief that ordinary and discarded materials hold creative potential.
Her coastal and wildlife subjects are painted with a commitment to realism, while her material works keep the evidence of the hand. For Blanché, making is both disciplined observation and a deeply restorative act.
Selected work
Three decades of making, hung on one wall
Painting, sculpture, pattern and objects for daily life, gathered in one place. Use the filters to move between them, and open any piece to look closely.
Mother and daughter
From Megan's lens to Blanché's hand
Blanché's daughter, Megan Fisher, photographs wildlife. Those photographs become the starting point for Blanché's paintings, so each animal is looked at twice: once through a lens, once through a brush.
Photograph Megan Fisher
Painting Blanché Fisher
Photograph Megan Fisher
Painting Blanché Fisher
The eye goes in last
A wildlife study takes weeks. The fur is built in thin layers until it holds light the way the photograph does, and the eye is left until the end, because it is the part that decides whether the animal is looking back at you.
It is slow, repetitive work, and Blanché describes it as the most restful part of making.
About the artist
A life shaped by place
Blanché grew up between Queenstown and Oudtshoorn. In Oudtshoorn she watched her father make paint from rocks and plants, an early lesson in the creative possibilities of ordinary material that has run through everything since.
Sedgefield and Knysna widened that curiosity into applied art. She painted Ndebele-inspired tablecloths and serviettes for a Knysna restaurant, then kept exploring acrylic and fabric painting while living in Botswana.
After moving to Port Elizabeth she committed more seriously to acrylic painting while continuing to work sea sand, grass, shells and discarded material into the surface. The coast remains a recurring source of subject, texture and form.
- Based in
- Gqeberha, Eastern Cape
- Works in
- Acrylic, mixed media, shell and found material, fabric paint
- Works across
- Painting, sculpture, applied art and functional objects
Get in touch
Say hello
Blanché is always glad to hear from people who have spent time with her work. Questions, conversations and kind words are all welcome.
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