JEREMY WAFER

According to critic Sean O’Toole, Wafer’s practice is “striking in its responsiveness to the particularities of South Africa’s land” (This is no place for lovely pictures, 2022). Indeed, throughout his forty-year career, Wafer has employed topographic and oceanic references to consider the geological and sociohistorical realities and imaginaries that surround his sites of investigation.

Wafer’s conceptual sculptures and site-specific installations point to the landscape and the sea as containers of memories, desires and vulnerabilities. A central work in the exhibition, titled Fathom (2022), a sculpture made from thirty metres of thick rope with plugs of lead casts at one-metre intervals. It is a reference to sounding lines used to measure the depth of water from boats. This tool for measurement lays tangled on the gallery floor, displacing its purpose. It is intended to highlight the artist’s interest in devices used to orient oneself, to gauge, to map and for the purpose of surveillance.

For this exhibition, Wafer experiments with displacing everyday materials, such as blankets, and uses materials intimately to the earth, such as soil, oil, water, and cement, to explore how textures and scents trigger memory. These materials are also used as metaphors in the artist’s reflections on precarity. In Pile, blankets are coated in bitumen waterproofing paint and placed on a trolley - transforming them from sources of comfort and warmth to sources of hostility. Lime sees canvas covered in whitewash loosely hung on the wall with forty-two dangling metal appendages, drawing on the seafaring tradition of wrapping deceased sailors in cloth with weights to allow the waters to carry their bodies to the ocean floor.