2014
ZAR twenty cent piece, African Etimoe, Yellowwood, gold leaf, Knysna Blackwood, Silver Tree leaves, Cape Holly, salt, rare earth magnet, Cassette player mechanism, plywood
106 x 32,5 x 32,5 cm
Lightbulbs, chrystals, goji berries, Himalayan cedar, tweezers and plywood
21x21x133cm
emergency car light, Time Life Book of the Weather.
2014
Swingball, lemon, motor, steel Dimensions variable
gold-leafed silver tree leaf
2014
Insect-attracting lightbulbs, minnow lures, feathers, fishing flies, bell, oak, steel, cable, pulley
235 x 42 x 42 cm
2014
Oil and spray paint on board, Meranti
125 x 45 x 8 cm (each)
bronze-cast chromed NikNaks, African Mahogony, wheels.
Soap, Crystals
Something has gone askew in the fundamental order of things.
We attempted to fix it, but stuff is stubbornly elusive in nature. We tried preserving the environment, but ran out of sodium benzoate halfway through. All romantic clichés were prohibited, yet the sunsets persist. Any remaining holes in the Ozone were filled with bubblegum-flavoured bubblegum. We prescribed a smorgasbord of ADHD meds, anti-anxiety pills and calamine lotions, but the fields grow restless still. The Mountain Dew™ sprinkler systems only cultivated a rise in weed obesity levels while, despite the instalment of thousands of swimming pools, the deserts are as impoverished and thirsty as ever. We ensured all our free-range organic oceans were bottled at the source with approved levels of iodine, fluorine and fluoxitine. We even invented an instrument to measure Spring with.
Maybe gravity got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Maybe the tides just need to be turned off and on again.
They say that perhaps tomorrow, it will be fine.
(Weather permitting, that is)
Toying with the representation of Nature as a pure and extra-cultural phenomenon, The Nature of Stuff and Things positions environments as deeply embedded in systems of interaction and exchange. Landscape, an idea inseparable from convention, is used as a medium to explore how personal, economic and visual value structures are projected onto the exterior world.
The “things” hail from an imaginary terrain, where anomalies are the status quo and matter mischievously imitates its observers’ personal quirks and desires; a mirage replete with existential predicaments and riddled with logical fallacies. Through techno-alchemical dabbling, familiar objects are subjected to extraordinary situations, while synthetic by-products are released back into the wild for the first time. Swayed by a process of post-natural selection, real and imagined associations of the land are superimposed, disrupting any essential purity which may be anticipated.
The products of this anxious arcadia are self-awarely escapist and ascribe to a kind of cynical optimism. They re-imagine natural phenomena yet the translation process is muddled, resulting in perplexing incidents and curious interactions; a misunderstood utopia. This process grasps at (and appears to tame) its subject, but has the quixotic efficiency of catching mist in a butterfly net.