Literature

Willem Boshoff is a conceptual artist, fascinated by language and words. Boshoff grew up in Vanderbijlpark, working with wood under the supervision of his carpenter father where he developed a respect for technical expertise and a deep love for wood. Boshoff has a great fascination with language, he remains a conservationist of plants and language. About Face and Overgesetsynde are diptychs of carved text creating a mirroring effect in the left and right panels, reversing the text in the left to create new words in the right. In About Face English vocabulary is used and in Overgesetsynde, Afrikaans. A similar work, Mutatis Mutandis, was exhibited as part of Boshoff’s retrospective exhibition Word Woes, from March 2021 to January 2022, at the Javett Art Centre in Pretoria. Mutatis Mutandis is designed in the same format as these works, but with the left panel in English, and the right in Afrikaans. Boshoff uses these sort of word games throughout his work, challenging the audience’s notion of language, driving home the point that written language is merely an arrangement of letters, and the meaning of the text lies entirely within the mind of the viewer. Rated, Devil, Eve, Edit, Knits and Eros reversed becomes Sore, Stink, Tide, Eve, Lived and Detar. There is both truth and absurdity to these works, as Boshoff draws attention to the relativity of communication, and the creation and context of meaning, while simultaneously executing the physical making of the wooden sculptural work with a practiced eloquence.