Exhibit Puts Focus on Artistic Contributions to Conservation
An exhibition at the Jack Heath Gallery on the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s (UKZN) Pietermaritzburg campus, titled: ‘Artists in the Archive: Retracing the Legacy of Nola Steele’, draws attention to the underrepresented and underappreciated contributions of the wives of game rangers, or ‘bush women’, to their essential conservation work.
Professor Ida Sabelis of the Vrije Universiteit Belgium, also an Extraordinary Professor at North-West University in South Africa, welcomed guests, including members of Nick and Nola Steele’s family, to the opening of the exhibit curated by Dr Jessica Draper, and colleagues and students from the Fine Art Department.
Nola drew the world around her with sensitivity and illustrated the publications of her husband, Nick, who was a pioneering game ranger, conservationist, and author whose work played a major role in shaping wildlife management in KwaZulu-Natal from the 1950s onward. He introduced the concept of a ‘conservancy’ and promoted collaborative wildlife protection and anti-poaching strategies that helped save the white rhino from extinction.
Nola’s line drawings, watercolour paintings, and intricate, lifelike bronze sculptures of the animals she and Nick encountered in their lives in game reserves, documented her life and enlivened her husband’s conservation work.
Professor Harry Wels, Associate Professor of African Organisational Anthropology at Leiden University in The Netherlands, and author of Securing Wilderness Landscapes in South Africa: Nick Steele, Private Wildlife Conservancies and Saving Rhinos, gave a virtual presentation emphasising the importance of highlighting Nola’s contributions.
“Women were, maybe still are, often the cornerstone of game rangers, families, and their work,” said Wels.
“Taking care of the household, the children, their schooling, and often providing unpaid labour for their husbands by undertaking all kinds of supportive tasks for which they were hardly, if at all, acknowledged. This exhibition is therefore also a matter of justice and of gender justice in which Nola is standing for all the other game rangers and game guards’ wives who were key and supported the work of their husbands,” he said.
Sabelis presented an overview of Nola’s life from an art student in Durban to an avid animal-lover and committed supporter of her husband’s work who accompanied him on rides into the bush, including an anecdote where Nola crossed out the word ‘wife’ in a book about ‘bush wives’ and replaced it with ‘woman’, indicating her independence and view on life.
Sabelis praised Draper and her team for the organisation of the exhibit, which included Nola’s tools and diaries that mirrored her husband’s, and provided a sense of walking into her studio.
In 2019, UKZN’s Special Collections and the Alan Paton Centre and Struggle Archives, in partnership with the Steele family and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, launched the Nola and Nick Steele Archival Collection. Donated by their sons, the collection includes personal and professional documentation, diaries, artwork, letters, reports and meeting minutes spanning 1949-2008. The collection illuminates the history of nature conservation in the province and the roles of Nick and Nola; Sabelis called it a “gem” for including the diaries of a woman alongside her husband.
The collection is being digitised, widening its availability to students, researchers, and the public. Nola’s art will join this archive.
Words and photograph: Christine Cuénod
