Blind Alphabet E

Notes

Willem Boshoff's Blind Alphabet series grew out of his own prolonged engagement with the English language. Afrikaans by upbringing, he set out in his twenties to gain fluency and standing within English-speaking academic and social circles, teaching at English-medium schools while compiling, over decades, extensive lists of unfamiliar and technical terms drawn from dictionaries, botanical nomenclature, and classical derivations.¹ By his own account, this private lexicographic project eventually ran to some 10 000 difficult words, later expanded into an 18 000-word "user-friendly" dictionary completed in 1999.¹ It became, in turn, the raw material for his sculptural practice.

In Blind Alphabet, Boshoff redirects this accumulated vocabulary into a deliberate reversal of authority between sighted and blind visitors. In the present lot, the sighted viewer encounters a wire-mesh cage set on a plinth, containing a carved wooden form whose shape corresponds to one of these obscure words. An instruction not to touch the work, an inscribed Braille text on the lid illegible to most sighted viewers, and the sheer repetition of identical boxes arranged in rows combine to produce a deliberate frustration, denying the visitor the customary ease of looking that a gallery space affords.¹

Blind visitors, unaware that the installation comprises hundreds of individual works, encounter each box in isolation, reading its Braille text before locating the sculptural form by touch. Able to proceed where sighted viewers cannot, they become, in effect, guides to the work. One blind participant is recorded describing the shift succinctly, noting that it was now their turn to "have it all."¹

The work belongs to a wider body of language-based installations by Boshoff exploring exclusion and comprehension across South Africa's linguistic diversity, including Kring van Kennis, which set texts from the country's eleven official languages into granite boulders at the Rand Afrikaans University.¹

^1. Willem Boshoff (2007) Knysna Fine Art, WILLEM BOSHOFF - BLIND ALPHABET E, 2007, online, accessed 3 August 2026.

Literature

Unknown Author (no date), art.co.za BLIND ALPHABET: D,E (1998), online, accessed 05 August 2026.

Stevenson Gallery (2007) Stevenson Gallery Willem Boshoff Blind Alphabet (Dacryoid - Drusiform) Blind Alphabet (Echinoid - Evection), online, accessed 05 August 2026.

Willem Boshoff (2023), Willem Boshoff, BLIND ALPHABET, online, accessed 05 August 2026