2023: Things Appear and Disappear |

2023: Things Appear and Disappear

For ‘Things appear and disappear’ I produced a series of 6 process-based drawings featuring the human skull as primary subject matter.

I employ a broad range of mark-making techniques including body prints, collage, drawn marks and the layering of multiple materials (blackboard paint, soil, builders chalk, oxides, twigs and leaves, charcoal and burnt ashes). Together these layered material surfaces and marks generate delicate, performative renditions of the human skull that, from afar, appear near ethereal and ghostlike, much like X-rays. In this way the works become self-contradictory, visually uniting the material and the immaterial (or spiritual) in the singular: once the viewer steps closer the image a disappears in a haze of near painterly layers and gestural marks, revealing its deeply material constitution. Moreover because the work is completed on blackboard paint it signals the possibility of provisionality and easy erasure – things appear and disappear indeed.

In South Africa there is a long history of artistically engaging with the skull as material. Historically the work of Alexis Preller, Neels Coetzee, Kendell Geers and Diane Victor all refer, for example. The recent forensic, material approaches by Kathryn Smith and Joni Brenner’s must also be mentioned in this regard. In all the works that form part of the solo exhibition ‘Things appear and disappear’ including these drawings, I attempt to advance a more performative material approach in relation to the subject matter of the human skull and death. I do so by firstly drawing attention to the central role of the human body – both of the artist and the viewer. In turn this suggests that death and the broad range of ideas and emotions that accompany it in the mind of the living are iteratively and relationally produced by way of various embodied material practices – such as drawing and interacting with an object, or looking at the artwork, for example.

For me drawing is relational, material practice. The drawing surface is understood as an apparatus, one that may momentarily if partially materialise various phenomena as meaningful entities. The first layer is a Rorschach type patterning rendered in layers of blackboard paint. These serve as surfaces for further gestural and material inscription: observational drawn marks are coupled with body prints, chalk droppings and splashes of soil. Sometimes a twig small rock or a leaf finds its way onto surface as add more soil onto it- these are glued and/or carefully tied to the surface with thin lengths of copper wire. Areas of written text remain barely legible, layered surfaces that have be (re)written, erased in layers. Ultimately the images seem materially and visually unstable (inside the frames specks of dust and debris collect at the bottom). It is difficult to know when to stop the process. For me the process of making and not the image requires resolve.