Jeremy Wafer | Material Immaterial | 2023
Material Immaterial is an exhibition of new work by Jeremy Wafer, coinciding with the artist’s seventieth birthday and following a residency earlier this year at the NIROX Sculpture Park where the artist continues his decades-long exploration of dislocation, memory and materiality.
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.
Artworks
About
Jeremy Wafer
Jeremy Wafer (b. 1953, Durban, South Africa) grew up in Nkwalini in what was then Zululand. He studied Fine Art at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (B.A.F.A.1979) and at the University of the Witwatersrand (B.A. Hons. in Art History 1980, M.A. Fine Art 1987 and PhD 2016).
Wafer taught in the Fine Art Departments of the former Technikon Natal (now DUT) and Technikon Witwatersrand (now UJ) before being appointed Professor of Fine Art in the Wits School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He retired from full time teaching in 2019.
Wafer is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, notably the Standard Bank National Drawing Prize in 1987 and the Sasol Wax Art Award in 2006. His work featured on the South African Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. Wafer has exhibited in South Africa and internationally, his work is represented in the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, the South African National Gallery, the Johannesburg Art Gallery as well as in many other museum, private and corporate collections.
Wafer lives and works between London UK and Johannesburg, South Africa.
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