While in Mexico on residency at Casa Wabi, I spend over a month drawing in the ocean’s water – twice daily for 45-60 minutes at 6:00/18:00. I complete these works to to prepare for the performance of Will you be mine (Del Mar*1). The close, daily contact with the sea water, the waves, the swathes of white foam and the ever-present undertow all help to shape my thoughts and feelings about the project as a whole. But the experience involved in the process also changes me, my relationship to the water, the place and ultimately my expectations of thereof.

As with numerous other series of drawings I have completed before, I prepare the paper with blackboard paint & pigment and use white chalk as primary medium. I first fold the papers and make Rorschac-like patterns by dripping black paint on a section and then folding them onto one another. I do this a number of times until the paper becomes layered in thick and thin, black and grey areas of material possibility.

The method of drawing with chalk is quick and highly responsive to gestural marks. Working this way is also precarious and often, when the waves nearly swallow me or splashes of water cover the surface of the page, it erases large parts of each drawing. It doesn’t really matter and I keep drawing on the wet folded pages.

Sometimes I document the process on video and find the results poetic but also humorous and slightly ominous. The beach is not safe at all. These are rough waters.

One moment you are standing on damp sand and the next you are chest deep, battling with the undertow to not drag you further into the depths. A few days into the project I find a number of large fish bitten in half and spat out on the sand. Even a small crocodile doesn’t survive the maelstrom. I am a decent enough swimmer but these waters will easily claim me if I lose focus. Regardless the experience of drawing in the warm Pacific ocean is deeply pleasurable. I am lost in it.

How can I embody this lived experience on paper, make myself remember it and hopefully, when other people see the works, make them feel something similar too? I return to the water twice every day and soon it is the ritual that defines my time at Casa Wabi.

Exhibition Views

‘Will you still be mine?’ is an exhibition of process-based drawings I created in Mexico in 2024. The exhibition also includes selected photographs, videos, objects and ephemera that contextualise this body of work as part of my oeuvre.

The title of this exhibition , ‘Will you still be mine?’, is suggestive of the unresolved relationship I have with the ocean as the place of our origins and all the artworks I so routinely produce. As much as I belong to the world and it to me, the matter is never fully resolved. We live, die and the earth always changes. Much like the earth, its lands and waters, an artwork never truly belongs to anyone either. These things are always shared and immeasurably complicated thereby.

Johan Thom (Associate Professor in Fine Art, University of Pretoria)

Johan was amongst the first artists in residence at NIROX, joining our mutual friend, Willem Boshoff, NIROX’ inaugural resident. At the time, the rolling lawns and arbors we take for granted were mainly soil and rubble remnants from the commercial trout farm we inherited. Since then Johan has been a constant irrepressible force at NIROX, and an integral part of our journey. The drawings in this installation are from his recent residency at Casa Wabi in Mexico, supported by the Claire and Edoardo Villa Will Trust. They continue the artist’s devotion to the act of drawing – as a form of performance – where process and outcome are inextricable and equal. For me, their unpretentious beauty and my imagination of their making, invoke our deepest capacity to appreciate the enigmatic world we inhabit.

Benji Liebmann, founder NIROX Foundation

‘Will you still be mine?’ is shown at the Natura Space, NIROX Foundation and Sculpture Park, 20 September 2025 Closing tbc).