David Krut Publishing

Disc series:

Artists statement regarding the Disc series (2005):

These disks have been cast in resin and covered with white clay (the clay used in Zulu and Xhosa ritual practices), grey wood ash, black oxide and red iron oxide respectively. My use of these materials comes out of an interest in indigenous healing, transformation rituals and rites of passage. In these the triad of red, black and white is commonly used for different types of ‘medicinal material’. I don’t have a specialist understanding but black is associated with strong purgative materials, red with strengthening materials and white with restorative and/or liminal states, such as in the whited bodies of initiates.

I have used the grey ash in a similar way to the other materials to refer to or embody transformative states – as in the Catholic Ash Wednesday memento mori ritual of marking with ash – ‘remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return’.

The red and black oxides are not the materials actually used in traditional practice, but are a standard industrial material used to protect metal, bought at the local builders’ supply. This substitution of the original material is partly practical, but also reveals the influence of the urban industrial environment. I seem to shift between the rural and urban in all of my work. The clay is sourced from traditional healers who sell it in pieces the size and shape of cricket balls. I also go around digging up bits of earth, generally from road cuttings.

So, while my use of these materials started off from this interest in transformation rituals, I have at the same time a strong interest in land(scape), particularly in South Africa, that is the material of the surface of the earth: bleached dryness, burnt veld, rocks and stones … all the time seeing these as equivalents of, or resonating with, more internal states of being or feeling.

The patterning on the sculptures, repetitive grids of small or larger bumps, comes I think from a need to measure, mark out, stabilise, the more illusive/allusive feelings associated with the material. Connected to this is my interest in mapping, and human intervention in the landscape. The repetition also comes out of the casting process in which an originating mould is used to produce series of similar or dissimilar casts … a kind of theme and variation process of working.

The process starts with making decisions about size and proportion, measuring and calculating curves, marking these out on templates, shaping the original form which will generate the series, making a mould, casting … rubbing down and then applying surfaces. The surfaces are themselves a bit of a process, mixing different pigments and binders, testing them out and settling for those that have the right resonance and relation to one another. Ideally one has some peace and quiet to work in, but otherwise it just has to be done in the normal rush. I spend quite a lot of time just mulling over the half-made things in the workshop.

See also:

The Monograph art book and Educational supplement TAXI-003: Jeremy Wafer

These and other works are also available through DK Projects

Keywords: Painting, History, Arts-and-Culture, Design, monograph, Photography, Art, South-African, International, Bookstore