Jeremy Wafer

Current Review(s)

'Structure'

Jeremy Wafer at KZNSA

The Structure of Things

Peter Machen talks to acclaimed former Durban artist Jeremy Wafer, who was back in his home town recently with a retrospective exhibition at the KZNSA Gallery.

Peter Machen: Hi Jeremy. Firstly, what led you in the aesthetic and conceptual direction you have taken over the course of your career? Do you think that you would have produced similar work if you hadn't lived in Durban? And do you think that you were influenced to any degree by the pseudo-Soviet aesthetic of the old South Africa?

Jeremy Wafer: A big question which involves one's whole biography probably! The work of artists I was looking at in art magazines in the 70’s – Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Mary Miss, conceptual art, land artists digging holes in the ground,  photographing water towers etc. –  All this seemed to offer a different way of being after the bleakness of school and army.

My work has been very much about place: the industrial Jo'burg landscape of mine shafts and dumps, the richness of Durban: Cato Manor temples, Maydon Wharf, the pier, Warwick Triangle. I don’t know about the aesthetic of the old South Africa but I love the Soviet artists Tatlin and Rodchenko. I think one's sensibility is formed in place and time. I was born in Durban and spent my first year or so in the naval barracks on the Bluff, then boarding school, and later teaching at Tech for about 20 years.

PM: Many of your works have a strange dual effect on me. On one hand, the singularity of the work suggests to me a certain brutality and violence; and at exactly the same time, I find the work transcendent, almost peaceful. I have the same response to freeway interchanges, cooling towers, water towers and highways. Is my response to your work a common one, and is it any way part of your intention?

JW: I am drawn to things which have  a plain functionality, not just in a modernist form/function way, but the directness of ordinary things like warehouses, bridges, containers etc.  I don’t always know what my intention is but I do like a wall to be wall, a cube a cube, a hole a hole etc. And I do see these as somehow fundamental qualities. It is a quick slide from fundamental/ essential to metaphysical perhaps. It's always a bit awkward using terms such as ‘transcendent’ but maybe there is something in the ‘truth=beauty=truth’ thing. (Or maybe its just a Catholic upbringing!)

16 August 2009 - 05 September 2009

Listings(s)

'Structure'

Jeremy Wafer at KZNSA

This exhibition and the companion publication of the same name traces the artist’s production over a period of 25 years. The project starts by assuming that geometry is underlined by something greater than numbers, measurements, angles, trigonometry and the immediate beauty that originates from these applications of mathematics. It tries to fathom, beyond the strictly austere and the exactingly severe, the variability of emotions that function beneath the form.

16 August 2009 - 05 September 2009