for the sake of time spent

These works stem from identifying an underlying, brooding feeling of anxiety and disruption arising from the pull between two important factors. The first is my love for mountains and my subsequent stubborn desire to produce sublime drawings and paintings informed by mountains in an attempt to provide some kind of glorification for these phenomena, as well as to immerse myself in them when I cannot physically experience them. The second is being in the studio struggling with the expectation of having to produce work that is critical of this manner of representing mountains. Thinking critically about the representation of mountains involves the realisation that landscape, and therefore my view and experience of mountains, is a construct of the mind, an idea that I now choose to play with.

The drawings on exhibition are the result of my conscious decision to bring the aforementioned two factors together by embracing the unsettled space that is my studio practice. As such, they become very much about my working process in which I push and play with the tension between my control and lack thereof, between obsessively ordered structure and chaos, between the tame and the sublime, as well as with the tension between repulsion and attraction. I strictly and very deliberately control the elements and variables that go into making the drawings by molding them into a rigid structure/formula that I have to follow through in order to realise the drawings, yet the resulting drawings could seem fairly unsettled.

The elements that I experiment with include distance, time, and disruption. More specifically, the variables that I have at my disposal within the studio space comprise the size and length of my brush, drawing on the floor versus drawing on the wall, and time. The element of distance is implied in the fact that I work in a studio using my photographs of mountains instead of working in nature directly from mountains. I then further play with this sense of distance by altering the distance of my drawing tool, moving from a very long to a very short drawing tool. I work with the elements of time and disruption by layering the lines of a general idea and of a detailed description, as well as those of blind contour and muscle memory as I stare fixedly at my drawing and the photograph of the mountain for the duration of my set structures of time.

The idea is that this system/formula forces me to work tirelessly, to always produce, and to not waste time feeling anxious with nothing to show for it. In addition, the formula becomes a necessity in the working process, in that it serves as a manner of coping with my anxiety, as well as ironically intensifying it by drawing a greater deal of attention to time and measurement. Ultimately, the drawings embrace obsession; obsession with mountains, obsession with all the elements and decisions that constitute my process and obsession with layered line work.

Sosyskloof Trail Series