Chalkboard Cartoon Teacher — Life-Size Sculpture, School Forecourt, Cape Town

Thirty-one years teaching mathematics in the same building. When she retired, the staff wanted something and could not agree on what, until a former pupil suggested the board.

The proposition

That the sculpture be the blackboard, and that she be drawn on it. Not a figure holding a board — the figure itself as a board, with the chalk linework describing her form.

Drawing with chalk on a curve

The ground is a dead-matte near-black, which is the most demanding surface in the trade: it shows every imperfection and it absorbs light, so the modelling of the form has to come entirely from the white lines.

Everything on the piece is drawn in chalk-white: the outline of the face, the spectacles, the line of the jaw, the folds of the dress, the fingers, the raised arm. The lines vary in weight the way a real hand moves, heavier where the arm would press and thinner at the ends of strokes. There are three deliberate errors in them, all taken from her actual handwriting, including a stray mark at the corner of the mouth where the chalk slipped.

The smudges were the last thing we did and the most difficult. A blackboard that has been used and partially wiped has a specific look: grey clouds of chalk dust in the areas where a sleeve has crossed it. We reproduced eleven of them with a dry brush over the finished matte, following the arc a right hand would sweep.

Why matte

Gloss would have turned the piece into a decorated black object. A dead-matte blackboard with matte chalk lines is a piece about erasure and re-writing, and she has confirmed that this is what she wanted without ever using those words.

At the school gate

It stands inside the forecourt at 2.1 m, facing the gate, so that pupils meet it coming in rather than going out. The school has instructed the caretaking staff not to clean the smudges, and has already had to repaint the plinth once because children keep writing on that too.