Acclaimed for an artistic practice that engages both materialist and conceptual thinking, Jeremy Wafer’s work is often visually situated in the field of abstraction and formalism, yet his concerns are coupled to his social-political, geographical and cultural context. In his exhibition Index, Jeremy Wafer’s sculptural installation is the principal medium in which the notions and implications of location, boundaries, and constructed borders are investigated.
Through a lens both personal and political, he offers revisions and reworkings of elements from previous bodies of work, which allows them to gain new meaning and different understandings through their relational context.
The artist believed that this looking back, which he undertook in the studies towards his doctorate, created a space for thinking about his personal geography and the mental architecture of his life, from childhood to practicing fine art. He says of this reflection: “It seems to me I have had only a handful of good ideas in my lifetime and I came to understand that what I do is to constantly try to improve on my expression of these ideas. Come to think of it, perhaps this is really what all artists do”. However, this exhibition _Index_ will bring these familiar constituents into new focus as being rescripted in ways that advance complete engagement with the issues that extend outwards from this personal and geographic centre.
Much of the artist’s work deals with the imprint of human architecture and its boundaries, divisions and separations. He speaks of these from a South African perspective as evidence of the racial separation of apartheid, the dawning awareness of class divisions, and of physical barriers born of the need for security and the desire for possession of physical space. He writes: “I like the term embodied, material minimalism, which highlights the central role of material and the specificity of substance. As a student in the early ‘70s I was looking at artists such as Smithson, Beuys, and Hesse… There was an interest in breaking away from pure formalism to an engagement with the psychical and physical processes in the actualisation of art and also reflecting personal and social concerns and critique.”
In this body of work, the artist references familiar elements – corrugated iron, and the archetypal house – with new materials, sulphur being the most significant addition. Sulphur, which is paradoxically somewhat toxic and naturally healing, is used in this context for its vivid colour, pungency, and acridity. The sulphur is accumulated onto a square pillar, which is another reference to the built environment which Wafer uses to consider and explore the concept of physical and personal space.
Corrugated iron, which is used as a fundamental resource for building shelters, is often dismantled and moved around, and offers us an opportunity to consider the ephemerality, or fragility, of a person’s place in the world. The specificity of location is explored in a photographic documentation of territory in Sao Paulo, Brazil, through which the Tropic of Capricorn runs. The archetypal house, in this exhibition, is wooden, charred, and deliberately rammed into a corner. This structure, presented in a destablised manner, is considered in a revised context in relation to the other works on show.. The overall installation suggests both the vulnerability and constructed nature of personal locations.
Artworks
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Artist Bio
Jeremy Wafer (b. 1953, Durban, South Africa) works across sculpture, photography, video and drawing, exploring the politics and poetics of place. Rooted in South Africa’s social, cultural and political geography, his work engages issues of land and territory, particularly themes of location, dislocation, possession and dispossession.
Wafer studied at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (B.A Fine Art, 1979) and at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (B.A. Hons. in Art History 1980, M.A. Fine Art 1987 and PhD, 2017). He has taught in the Fine Art Department of the Technikon Natal, Durban, and at the School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he was appointed Professor of Fine Art in 2011.
Solo exhibitions include: 'Material Immaterial,' Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2023); 'Arc,' Goodman Gallery, London (2022); 'Index,' Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2017); Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2014); 'Structure: Avenues and barriers of Power,' a retrospective at KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2009).
Group exhibitions include: 'Centre of Gravity,' The Old Soap Works, Bristol (2020); 'Ampersand,' University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg (2019); 'Everywhere but Here,' Cite International des Arts, Paris (2017); 'What remains is Tomorrow,' The Pavilion of South Africa at the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2015); 'Witness,' Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2014); 'Views of Africa,' Smithsonian National Museum of Air and Space, Washington DC. (2013); and '20: Two Decades of South African Sculpture,' NIROX Foundation, the Cradle of Humankind, (2010).
Wafer’s work features in the following public collections: the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC; South African National Gallery in Cape Town and the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
Wafer lives and works between London and Johannesburg.
