COLLECTION
This exhibition (2008) was held the downstairs rooms of the Standard Bank Gallery. The space lends itself to a display of objects in a fashion that recalls museum collecting, and it is a space perfectly suited to my practice. I have long worked consciously with the conventions of museum display and their strategies of presentation. Collections of work always seem to me to be fragmentary in the sense that there is much left unknown or unshown, and as viewers we are much like archaeologists piecing together a broader story from fragments.
I work in my studio all the time – I believe in daily practice. I make sculptures in clay, and I make watercolours, large and small. I make oil paintings on canvas, on stone, on wax. I carve into rubber slabs and make casts of these in plaster, I make plasticine sculptures, I decide which works to cast in bronze, and which works to group together. I just work, sometimes knowing exactly what I am doing and sometimes not knowing at all. I like the unimagined possibilities that open up through such an approach. This way of working produces an enormous amount of work, which is stacked in my studio, in my lounge, dining room, bathroom and kitchen. I live with the work, some of it I leave – quite a lot of it, and some of it I rework or discard. Sometimes it feels like I live in an archaeological dig, excavating and collecting my own work.
