Notes

It is a privilege to be able to reflect on two very early works in my toothpick-medium body of work, while still very much engaged in the process of refining, understanding and pushing my medium almost four years later.

The titles of the two works were, in many ways, an attempt both to form a language related to my thinking around the abstract works I was making, as well as continuing my practice of utilising the ‘found’. In the case of the works themselves: found objects, and in the case of the titles, quotes and fragments taken from numerous sources which resonated with me in some way:

Things could have been different but they couldn’t have been better (2018) is a work of great confidence in the material; unaltered and unadorned, it is simply presented and stands to challenge all that we take for granted on a daily basis.
The heart reaching beyond the mind (2018) marks a very significant breakthrough in my practice, realising that the frame was no longer needed to locate and support the material, but that it was sufficient in itself to hold its own form, opening up a new avenue for the formal exploration of these works.

Utilising a mundane material, embedded within the social fabric of our time, has allowed my abstract works to be considered contextually within this contemporary moment.

I initially began to form the idea that the transcendence of the material resided in the relating of the ‘one’ to the ‘many’, which allowed me to think anthropomorphically and politically about these abstract works: the singular in relation to the plural and the individual in relation to the communal.

The biomorphous, fur/coral/organic-like formal by-product of a material-led and intuitive studio working process has led me to consider these works as an ecologically aesthetic response to our mass-consumerist society.

Chris Soal

Provenance

Lizamore & Associates.

Exhibited

No End Contemporary Art Space, Johannesburg, Chris Soal: Orbits of Relating, 24 May to 23 June 2018, artworks from the same series exhibited.