Artists

Chris Soal is an award-winning, emerging South African artist. Soal’s studio-based practice is sculptural in its output, working with objects and materials in ways which show not only a conceptual engagement with the contexts and histories of the objects but also re-enforce the body as a site for knowledge reception and production.

Soal’s works seek to make a poetic statement through the simplest of means, engaging the viewer’s spatial awareness and perception while challenging societal assumptions of value. Through his use of discarded and mundane ephemera, such as toothpicks and bottle caps, along with concrete, rebar, electric fencing cable, and other industrial materials, Soal’s work intuitively develops the familiar to the point of the uncanny.

Soal’s works can be considered as a social abstraction that is deeply rooted and reflective of having grown up in Johannesburg, South Africa. Foregrounding our current pressing ecological concerns, the artist’s works with toothpicks primarily consider and seek to expose the paradoxical relationship humankind has with nature, that of simultaneous dependence and domination.

Biography courtesy of the artist.