Inga Somdyala [IS]: When I started folding boats from the Readers Digest Maps of Southern Africa I would invite friends, but the novelty eventually wore off. I was reading your conversation with Usha, Walter, where you spoke about having to go beyond a certain threshold. That resonated with me; the time spent with it. My interest in these atlases was tied to the historical narrative of the Frontier Wars that I was reading at the time. I wanted to look at the map of South Africa and spend more time with it. I’m trying to think of creative ways to open it up for people, to see if they can engage, because sometimes I’m not looking. Sometimes it’s automatic. I watch something and my hands are working, but other times it’s a bit slower. I look at the paper as I’m folding it and I see an interesting place name or a different aspect of the map. . .

Walter Oltmann [WO]: You also talk about educational set-ups. Do you have a memory from your school days, of folding boats? Is that where it came from?

IS: Funny enough, I never learnt to do it when I was younger. I would always see someone on television folding a hat or a boat. . . We did make paper planes when I was younger, but I never learnt to make boats. I had to teach myself, and this was part of it.

WO: There’s something very magical about how they pop up: this simple boat that emerges out of a piece of paper.

IS: Yeah, yeah. I had to cut them into these little rectangles before folding them into the three-dimensional object. That’s also quite interesting to see — the kind of shapes that they make and how they sit in a bag when they’re bunched up. They even make a sound that I really like.

WO: One could also think in terms of animation. I don’t know if you’re interested in that, but Sven was saying that you’re thinking of making quite a lot of these boats while at the Centre, to scatter on the floor or create an installation out of. There’s huge potential.

IS: I have some pretty grand ambitions for this kind of thing [Laughs]. I guess I’m still excited about it because it feels so dynamic. I have made a single object out of it, but there was something about making that object that broke the collective of them. The other day I was telling Sven about how I felt when the work was sold — I had amassed a bunch of these and wasn’t thinking about making objects out of them, initially, but then I experimented and tried something and I thought it looked quite nice so I kept going. It was this really short period where I was just tacking the boats onto these two pieces of rope. When I tied them together they made this gorgeous shape, and this sound. But I remember the feeling I got when that went away. It was a beautiful object and we showed it about a year ago, during a group show. It sold, but I was quite sad when it went. I realised that I had just lost a huge volume of the boats that I had amassed over time. At the moment it feels like something that can be more dynamic than a single object. In terms of what can be done with it in space.

WO: There’s a digital print that you created of very orderly-placed chairs [100 Chairs, 2017–9), and you talk about it in terms of regimentation; orderliness in relation to a more informal approach. You also talk about formal and informal education. There’s something there that could also be interesting to play with.

IS: I also enjoyed your conversation with Usha because you touch on embodied knowledge in reference to her domestic space; a different kind of knowing of oneself and one’s space. But I’m also thinking about an interview I was reading with Kabelo Malatsie online. She speaks about wanting to explore different modes of embodied practice that are not necessarily result driven, and that can, in a way, aid the process and keep the process going, without focussing on the outcome. She also speaks about her interest in the underground — practices that go unseen but nonetheless persist, regardless of whether or not they’re recognised. I think about that. When you look at an object and see the amount of time that goes into it. . . I’m quite struck by the intricacy of some of your objects, and what you can do with wire. It’s the kind of thing I really want to touch and encounter on a material, tactile level.

WO: In your writing, you speak about a sensory experience with materials, and how that runs through much of what you do. Even when you make your installations, there’s a placement of things, and an approach to building that links to what we were doing in A Quiet Focus (2022–3), with Usha and Chris — a direct manipulation of materials by hand.

Sven Christian [SC]: The boats also make me think about proximity or distance. There’s a condensation that happens when making those maps. You select what information goes into them, but the experience of a map is also somehow distant. Cutting them out, holding them in your hands, transforms that experience. It brings it closer to home. The hand intervenes. There’s also something about the fragility of those boats versus the certainty of the map.

IS: It comes back to this sense of knowing it differently, because there is that gap, where I look at a map of my hometown and experience it differently, having lived there. But also understanding the distance between spaces. The environment that I grew up in was very much a cluster of small towns. My grandmother lived in Cofimvaba, close to Komani (Queenstown). We moved between Komani and Confimvaba when I was younger. My aunts lived in other places around the Eastern Cape like eNgcobo, eMthatha, and East London. I drove between these places often. Encountering the map in this way is just a different way of knowing or experiencing that distance.

SC: In “Ilizwe Lifile” (2019) you write about your film-based work, Izandla Ezingcolileyo Act I & II (2019): the residue that is left on your hands, and the body as a site of conflict with one’s surrounds; what is internal/external, and how the two shape one another. It relates to something Walter often says about how, when making, it’s not just having this idea that you execute or impose on the material, but how that material informs and shapes what one makes.

IS: If I may, I’m interested in your relationship to wire, Walter. I read your interview with Sven and feel like I now have an understanding of your technical approach to the material — the immediacy, the cumulative thing — but I’m curious if, other than that, you feel like there’s something in the material that speaks back to you?

WO: Certainly. Wire holds. It keeps the shape that you’ve bent it into, so you can capture something and leave it, or fold it. It’s a bit like when you fold paper. It’s able to maintain what you do to it, whereas, when you work in thread, it tends to flop around. It becomes soft and hangs. It’s different. I’ve worked with those kinds of materials, but I’ve always liked how wire captures that information. Its form is directed through the repetitive process.

IS: It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for a while, in my use of paper and canvas: the memory of those materials. It’s where that thought on residue has gone, right? Even in some newer works.

WO: What are you working on at the moment?

IS: I’ve continued my interest in ochre but I’ve started making these nautical flag signals with unstretched canvas. There’s a kind of lexicon, I suppose, but they’re letters that you can rearrange and create your own messages. I’m interested in this visual translation of textual information, because it’s text, but these symbols are also abstract, squares and circles . . . Any given signal could contain four or eight or ten flags, but I fold them and apply ochre to certain layers and build them up that way, so there’s this surface memory. I think about how I apply soil and ochre to the surface, even when making the stretched works, and about what that fabric will and will not hold. Most of my older paintings are quite dense. There’s a rough residue — chalk, compost, and debris. In the body of work that I made last year, I was also playing with these fields of colour, these scapes, playing with that density or creating light layers to see how they would effect each other and filter through. There were many instances in the flatter paintings when I worked with this ruptured surface, this inside and outside, where there’s something on top of the other colour. So surface memory has been a developing thought for me — what the surface will hold and what it will let go of. In the denser paintings, I work on the floor. When I pick them up a lot of stuff tumbles off, so it takes some and leaves some.

WO: It’s interesting to hear you talk about the flags and language. I think back to the work that you made using school desk frames, which you took apart to create this abstract language. At first I didn’t know what it was about, but when I read your text it made perfect sense. It’s one of my favourite works of yours. There’s something so simple and yet so extremely captivating about it.

SC: It reminds me of your work, Walter, with the dowsing sticks — Unearthed (2007). There’s an abstraction that happens there too; the desire to intuit something that is not easily apparent. It’s a searching process, like what Inga said about sustained curiosity.

IS: Another thing that stuck with me in some of those conversations was this idea of planting and revisiting an idea, in order to expand, extend, improve, sharpen, or deepen it in some way. That’s quite important for me. Sometimes it’s not even intentional. Like what Kabelo was saying, it becomes this persistent interest — the ability to sustain your engagement with those ideas and to continue to dig.

WO: Language and code are also about repetition; the eternal potential of it. It opens up to so many variations or permutations, which is what we do with our repetitive use of objects.

SC: Ochre also has this stickiness to it. It stains. Wire is something that you can touch and perhaps it picks up your sweat, but it doesn’t stick to you in the same way. It doesn’t stay on the body, but as you say, you can transfer the body’s memory into the material, and it can hold that memory.

WO: Yes, it’s a different kind of memory.

IS: Definitely. I like that idea of endurance. I have a different sense of Chris’s process now, after reading your conversation, because like he said, there might be a different conception of the studio process to when you see the work on the wall. You see the results of that persistence, that sense of time.

WO: You did printmaking alongside your sculptural and painterly work. What is it about the printed element that interests you?

IS: Printmaking was my undergrad, but it was quite a pivotal point in my arts school trajectory, I suppose. I struggled with a lot of the theory and with what I was being taught. At first I rejected printmaking for its tedium but at some point, in my second year, there was a shift in my thinking. It did something to my sensitivity to materiality. There was so much about that process that required consideration — things that you couldn’t see, like grease on a plate or how wet your paper was or keeping your plate on the hot plate so that the ink runs into the burr. Even the whole process of developing an image did something to my looking at images in general. So I walked out of the print studio and had a different sense of photography and its magic, and how much it has changed. I also had a different sense of how images are composed in order to make meaning and communicate. I was reading things around me on a material level, so it sensitised me to a lot of things. I think my relationship to materiality comes from that feeling I get in printmaking.

WO: You did those really beautiful images that were printed on grass mats. How did you do that? Was it a photographic process?

IS: I had a bunch of images of old Transkei, some Duggan-Cronin photographs, and I really wanted to do something with them that was somewhere between abstract and readable. A friend who I was working with at the time, Xhanti [Zwelindaba], had done these works a few years before for his honours year, where he made these quilts out of small fabric pixels. He would take a digital photograph and break it into pixels, then place each pixel on this large backdrop of fabric. He’s pursued this technique, but I wanted to play with something like that, where you get up close to the image and its abstract and you back up and get a better sense of it. I had these grass mats and photographs, so I took them to the CadCAM area at Michaelis and asked if they could engrave them into the grass for me — they’re very fine laser engravings. We did a lot of tests to make sure it didn’t burn. It was quite difficult, but yeah, it’s something that I’d like to try and do again, to explore the engraving process more.

SC: Do you engrave the whole or individual strands?

IS: That was one of the main struggles. If you look at how those mats are bound, there are these individual strands but then on each side is a weave that runs through. The laser had to be fairly light, in strength, but it did burn through some of those threads. They became very very fragile. There was something about that. I insisted on not having a backing for them, because there was something lovely about them almost breaking apart.

SC: Trying to preserve that fragility, to temper erosion whilst keeping it on the surface — pointing to processes of disintegration — reminds me of your early interest in gabions, Walter.

WO: Yes, my very early sculptures were based on roadside gabions, those wire cages with rocks in them. I was still working with steel wire, which rusts over time, and looking at some of Robert Smithson’s sculptures, which were about containment and entropy and disintegration. I’ve moved away from that now, but those themes were certainly interesting to me.

SC: It’s the same with Silverfish, this creature that eats into books . . .

WO: I was talking to one of the residents at NIROX, Nathalie [Karagiannis], who said that she preferred my works with bristles, because they had an edge to them. Some of the works I’ve made need that edginess — the other side of perfect; something to counter the perfection of craft. Otherwise it becomes a bit too passive.

SC: You feel that corrosive energy with the anodising too. I like that, in relation to the transformative nature of your subject matter.

IS: I was also thinking about the suits that you make. Looking at something like Carpet Piece, which I’m very attracted to, and then thinking about the move from this kind of abstract work to these objects that are more representative, but as you say, they’re like exoskeletons — they’re still somehow in between. They hold as objects but are built around the figure.

WO: Yes, like a skin or crust between the figure and outside world. At the moment I’m working quite a bit with plant related things. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m at NIROX, which is very open to the environment, but I’m seeing if there’s some connection between the plants and suits; if there’s some looking back happening with them too, this visage.

IS: I think about this separation between ground, root, and leaf, where it feels like there’s something happening below and another thing happening above. A kind of interior / exterior.

SC: Like your burying canvas?

IS: That’s maybe my want to capture a little bit of that unseen, to get a different image of it. I guess it’s also a time thing, right? I don’t know how long each canvas will be buried, but the time spent underground seems significant.

SC: Perhaps, again, it’s about that sustained indeterminacy? To put a time frame on it would change that. The magic is really to have them in the ground, not knowing how they are going to turn out.

IS: Totally, it becomes a lot more about the site than the object.