‘Scale’ featured only three works and most of the materials were recovered and re-used from my ‘Once, again’ at Mark Coetzee’s other, smaller venue the previous year. Here I further developed my ideas around disposable plastics and immersed myself once more in very labour-intensive works. I also took up again a piece I’d been working on since my student days.
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Photos by Dave Southwood except Fold by Mike Hall.
Cardinal, 1999, pins, polyurethane foam, diameter 15cm
Apart from the small foam core, this work is made entirely of pins built up layer by layer, all of them recovered from the previous year’s installation. The title was a riff on the magnetised pins and needles we used to fashion rudimentary compasses when I was a kid. When observed from a distance, the cardinal directions are meaningless on a spherical planet; only directions towards or away from the centre of the planet are of any use. The title also plays off the other spherical work in the show which was in fact closer to a cardinal red. The sphere, it seemed to me, had a dual identity as both a unit and a whole.
Fold, 1998, cable ties, 215 x 140 x 114cm
I had largely harvested these materials from Cape Town lampposts where they were used to fix posters. I learned to open them with a pocket knife and frequently went prospecting on my basket-mounted bicycle, which could serve as a makeshift ladder for cable ties I couldn’t reach. Most of them were used to create the piece in ‘Once, again‘. I spent more than six months making this construction, constantly caught between what the structure wanted to do and how I wished it to appear. I took some inspiration from the ‘Tablecloth’ cloud that poured over Table Mountain in the Southeaster, while the marbled pattern of its surfaces was born of the medium and close to what I’d created previously with the materials.
Kernel, 1994 -1999, plastic bottle sealing strips, diameter 35cm
I had begun this as a student, starting with the red plastic strips used to seal bottles of sorghum beer sold to the Zulu labourers in KwaZulu-Natal, collected near where my father lived. I’d been working on this on-and-off for a few years, and in the final stages, I collected and used the plastic sealing strips from cheap wine favoured by Cape Town’s homeless people who lived on a route I used to get to work. Those elements too had been part of my installation the previous year.
Paul Edmunds 