Sven Christian [SC]: Let’s chat about your first residency in 2014. What were you making at that time?

Sean Blem [SB]: 2014 was a very special year. We spent about eighteen months in preparation for the residency, which was set up for four months. All these things needed to fall into place beforehand. I proposed a large permanent clay sculpture, in the form of a mastaba, to be left out in the Cradle. The sculpture would be fired in-situ and become a permanent clay structure.

SC: What is a mastaba?

SB: The word comes from Egypt. It refers to one of the most significant pre-pyramidic structures built by humans. Prior to the pyramids, the majority of important buildings — archival, spiritual — were mastabas. It’s this flat-roofed, oblong form with sides that slope outwardly down. Because of its form, it’s one of the most natural, resilient architectural structures. It’s resilient to weather, armed conflict, all manner of adversity. It’s a time-tested form. It also has a special visual resonance, and I was interested in it because of this iconographic quality. Growing up in Johannesburg, when you drove around, mine dumps were a part of the landscape. And they take the same form, due to gravity, wind, the way that trucks leave their deposits. . . There was always this icon, wherever you went. I would always ask my parents about them, but never received an adequate explanation. I thought that they were evocative and enigmatic. They were part of the environment, but also so out of place. In the 1980s, a botanist figured out how to grow plants on them and they started to disappear.

The initial project for the clay mastaba remains unrealised. Parallel to my mastaba research, I began researching the development of language and the frontal cortex in humans. Because I was going to be working in the Cradle of Humankind, I was interested in when our early ancestors moved from not having a pre-frontal cortex to having one.

I was meant to arrive on 20 January 2014, but in the months leading up to the residency I had a serious medical incident. I didn’t know what was going to happen or if I was going to survive. In the end everything worked out well. I survived and three weeks after the operation I was in Johannesburg. It was particularly interesting because this incident took place in my frontal cortex. This was remarkably coincidental. When I initiated the process with NIROX, my knowledge of the brain was already quite developed. The first brain project I did was in the early ‘90s. But what I experienced taught me a huge amount about myself and my frontal cortex.

SC: I remember the story. It was early morning. You were still in bed. Everything was normal, then you went prone, your arms went up. . .

SB: It had been a very active, stressful period. I thought I was dealing with it well and my work was going well. Everything was good, but it was perhaps a little too much. On this particular morning, I had woken up and then gone back to sleep. I immediately entered a very deep sleep. My wife had left briefly and when she came back to bed, I looked fine. But she sensed something was strange. I was lying on my back and seemed very stiff. My eyes were open and I was looking at the ceiling. The next thing my whole body stiffened. My arms and hands went up [gestures above his head]. My legs were taut. My whole body was taut. But my facial expression hadn’t changed. My eyes were just looking vacantly out. With the level of tension, I popped both shoulders out of their sockets. Then I woke up. I was completely shocked and didn’t understand how I could go from being asleep to being in the most extraordinary pain.

I had something called a cavernoma in my frontal cortex, on the righthand side; an area which effects spatial perception, language, and creativity. They told me that this cavernoma had a low-pressure bleed, which resulted in the seizure. To stop this from happening, I was prescribed extremely strong medicine, which I would have to take for the rest of my life, but the side-effects are horrendous. I felt terrible when I started taking them. I was reading things and trying to figure out how to deal with the situation. I realised that I couldn’t continue my life, potentially, in any way that I’d envisaged before. I was meant to adopt an entirely sedentary life, with no exercise, and just take drugs, so how long was this going to last? How long was it going to be good? It just wasn’t.

Even though the prognosis was not hopeful, I was very fortunate to meet a neurosurgeon who specialised in cavernomas and is passionate about contemporary art. He was about to retire but decided to do the operation because he was intrigued, based on a number of small details: I was a contemporary artist, it was in the front right cortex, and I was a sculptor. It was a high-risk operation. If I did something radical and it worked, it was worth it. If I did something radical and it failed, well at least I tried. And that’s the way we went into it. The operation was a success, and so I came to NIROX less than a month later.

Upon arrival, I recognised the wish to work with the mastaba form but in the context of what I had recently experienced and consequently learnt. I became aware of a parallel to ancient sculptures by the Tellem, who were related to the Dogon peoples. Many of these sculptures, which I had been researching for the previous ten years or more, depict standing figures with their arms and hands outstretched above their head. They are often interpreted in connection to Dogon cosmology and knowledge of the stars. In light of my own experience, these sculptures suddenly made sense to me. So, I decided to create the Hyperextension (2014) pieces; to represent my hyperextension in relation to the Tellem pieces in the mastaba works.

SC: Through the base that supports the mastabas?

SB: Yes.

SC: There’s something sedentary about the base, like a palanquin — they can be picked up and carried. . .

SB: Absolutely. There’s a simplistic abstraction of the form of the hyperextension, but there’s also a conversation between the cradle structure and the mastaba form. Then there’s this hidden space within the mastaba that is created by the cradle, which holds it underneath, but it breathes. There’s circulation. Yet none of this is understood or seen. Then, if you hold the cradle and imagine these mastabas carried in a ceremonial situation, there’s something going back to the symbolic value of the mastaba. So, the Hyperextension series was stimulated by what happened to me, and my own self-processing of everything that was happening, which then related back into everything else that I was already researching before.

SC: Is ‘hyperextension’ a medical term?

SB: It was used in conversation with the neurologists to describe what happened. I think it was put out there by me. Specialists said mine was a very rare physical manifestation of the seizure.

SC: Did the choice in title have other implications? Does it have a multi-referential quality for you?

SB: I chose that title because it helped me cross-reference my questions about the Tellem sculptures. I didn’t have the incident and then realise all these things. When I had the incident, I didn’t know what was happening, but there was this massive feedback benefit from previous projects. I realised I had to put everything into understanding what was happening to me. During my residency I threw myself into trying to figure things out. Just like sometimes when you push on certain questions and delve into certain directions or specialisations in sculpture, painting, certain intellectual ideas, whatever it might be, you find things you don’t expect. Trying to find a way to survive meant that I started to look much further into the brain and related subject matter. I could see it trickling out and returning into my previous research, into the Dogon and different things that I had prior knowledge of, but it was only as a cathartic process after I had the operation that I could start to see these things.

SC: What were some of your material considerations on arrival, when you began work?

SB: When I arrived, I looked into how I might realise the big clay sculpture. Ultimately, it didn’t feel like the right thing to be doing. I somehow felt it was more relevant to do something in a different scale, and I suppose that was also referential — the Hyperextension series have this sort of independence; they can be picked up and carried. They have their own autonomy. This was interesting. I wasn’t cognitively analysing this and thinking, ‘Ok, I want to do that,’ but in retrospect that was probably why I wanted to do them that way.

I’m also interested in where resonance in works comes from. For example, what drew me to the Tellem and Dogon sculptures; they have this inner energy. You can look at a lot of works — whether contemporary, South African, European, going into more ancient works — and there are pieces which I think resonate beyond me as an individual. Then there are a lot of objects which might be really well made, technically, but they just don’t resonate. Everyone can read resonance on objects, places, and so on, but some are more attuned. I think it’s an active process. It can be encouraged. It also interests me to do things which are there, but not seen; to see whether those things are read or felt or have their own resonant frequency. So it’s a query. It can be perceived as a bit of fun, but it’s also about communication in general. The thing which is really interesting about resonance in objects, in art — or spiritual objects, it doesn’t have to be art per se — is that there is a communication; an active, two-way communication between the object and viewer. And I think this is hugely underplayed. People aren’t thinking about it, but there’s something there. It’s why we consider certain things beautiful, why some compositions make us feel good and why some things upset us. There is this communication going on and it’s something that I wish to understand more about.

SC: How much of what you describe has to do with the shift from communal values to individualism? I ask because both the Tellem sculptures and mastaba have a longer life. They’re intergenerational, so there’s an accumulation that happens. At the same time, the mastaba is found in different regions of the world, so there’s something more to that form that can’t necessarily be identified, perhaps because it goes too far back, to the point of being sort of embedded in one’s DNA, in a bodily sense, which makes it hard to pinpoint. I’m wondering if you feel like the quality of resonance you describe has that long duration, and if you think that the lack of attention to it is the result of increased focus on subjectivity?

SB: I think that it’s really interesting, and important, to reflect on something very simple, which is where we’re all form; this link to our earliest forbears. It dispels prejudice, fixed values, and so on. I think there’s a different sort of communication inside us which is passed down which we seem, to a large extent, to have lost, or we don’t know where the switch is to turn on the awareness of everything inside us. There are certain people, not necessarily artists, who look into what we are, what we think, why we behave the way we do. Such people are able to break societal norms by retracing this line. Sometimes there are benefits. Some people will be philosophically beneficial leaders who can bring everyone together and get them through certain problems. They have certain sensitivities, through which they are able to lead the people in whatever direction facilitates their survival. Or it might be that there’s a heightened perception which facilitates that certain objects are made that have a spiritual value, some sort of governance system based on worship. You have the start of religion, philosophy, art; all of these things which aren’t formulaic to begin with but become formulaic. They come from some sort of vein which is from the past, which is resonant. I don’t know the answers to all of these things. I don’t know the answers to almost any of these things, but that is something that I’m trying to understand.

SC: You talk about this two-way conversation between the object and the person encountering it. Religion is an interesting example here. LeRoy [Croft] told me that there’s a word for this, egregore. It describes a situation where, for example, someone walks into a cathedral and there’s a wooden carving of Christ on the cross. You hear of people having this profound experience. They start weeping or whatever. When you break it down into its very rudimentary parts, it’s just wood, but this person brings everything to that experience with them. Then there’s the long history of that carving, beyond its own individual specificity; the way it’s ingratiated itself into culture, tradition, practice, and belief, to take on a life that is larger than the wood or the carver. Both the mastaba and Tellem sculptures possess something of that long history. . .

SB: I don’t know if this is accurate, because I studied a lot of architectural history at university, but it was irrelevant which part of the world it was in. Whether I was studying stone pagodas in Korea or looking at mastabas in Egypt; certain forms resonated, and I became more and more attracted to them because of that. I enjoy not fixing the parameters of my understanding. I will research and research, and have a system, but even though I’m forming opinions I try not to become closed. I speak to people I consider experts. I read extensively, but sometimes there will be something that comes out of the blue. It’s not necessarily what the experts would accept but because there’s some sort of key-in area, from childhood or someone I know, I can come in through the backdoor — I can achieve another perspective on all that I’ve learnt. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s really based on something I can trust. It creates a very interesting juxtaposition. With the mastaba form there was, from a young age, this association to the mine dumps. At a certain point, I moved, and it’s possible that, because of this, my associations with the past became intensified in value. Certain iconic images from that past rose and rose in prominence. At the same time, this was largely unconscious. In my new environment I had to figure out how to survive. And I did. But when I got to the point where I could breathe and appreciate life beyond survival, then some of these things from previous periods started to percolate through. They were just inside me. But whenever I saw certain objects in my studies which cross-referenced them, their importance loomed. It steered me into the three-dimensional realm, and I was always interested to make these cross-references. I don’t think it was conscious until I was in my early twenties. And the mastaba form was really embedded in me in the 1970s by the mine dumps, as it was for many others.

I say that because when the 2016 works were complete, we held many open studio days. Many of the people who came through grew up in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. The iconography of Johannesburg had worked its way inside them. When they saw what I had done, they wanted an explanation. One of them was surprised. He started saying, well ‘So what is this all about?’ And I said, ‘Well, just look at them. If you’re interested, we can discuss them, but just look and see if something happens, for you.’ He said, ‘Yeah, these things are very familiar. I don’t know why.’ And it didn’t make him feel that comfortable. I didn’t say, ‘Look, this is the answer.’ I just said, ‘If they do nothing for you, walk away. It’s the best thing to do.’ But he was intrigued. He looked and said there was something strange about them. ‘Why the hell did you do them? What’s the point?’ There were associations happening for him which he didn’t really understand. He couldn’t identify why he was feeling attracted but uncomfortable. He couldn’t identify why he was suddenly having this communication, but he was. And so the next point was, ‘Just try to relax, and look, and try and read what is going on within you. Because that’s actually the most important thing.’ He did this and then wanted to know something about me, because now he was intrigued. I think up until then he thought I was from overseas. But the thing which he found most strange was that the objects were really from here. They were South African, somehow. They were tackling him on a level which he just didn’t really feel comfortable with, but he realised it was hugely familiar.

He went off somewhere, but then came back and wanted to spend some time with me and the work. We spoke about where I was from, where he was from, and so on. It turned out that we grew up in relatively similar areas and were about the same age. I said to him, ‘We’re the same age. We grew up not far from each other. Don’t you remember that there was something, when you grew up, which was iconographically similar to what you’re seeing here?’ He thought about it for a while and then said, ‘Yeah, there is something. But what the hell is it?’ And I said to him, ‘It’s the mine dumps.’ He then became incredibly emotional because he grew up next to the mine dumps. His associations were not the same as mine, but very similar. He’d played on the mine dumps, and I never got to go near them, because you couldn’t really, but if you lived right next to one, you could. He would play on them. The ones that he played on are gone. The ones that I used to see are gone. But they were golden in colour. And when the sunlight shone on them, they were amazing. For a child, they were extraordinary, awe-inspiring things which didn’t seem to fit with anything. And for this guy it was exactly the same as for me.

SC: You’ve spoken, in different contexts, about trying to maintain a degree of mystery. For example, withholding information to let someone figure out their own relationship to something. But also in terms of your biography and how others related to your diagnosis, trying to categorise or compartmentalise it to make it easier to digest, and your desire to remain in a space of unknowing, to be able to find a back door, a different perspective. I want to ask about the place of visibility in your work, on the one hand, and opacity, on the other? Not only on a conceptual level, but the forms you’ve chosen — a mastaba is this impermeable, architecturally sound form, for example, yet you’ve also spoken about their role in housing archival and spiritual objects, and about wanting to embed objects in your own work that remain hidden. To not spell things out for viewers. There seems to be this tension between exterior and interior, this play with varying degrees of visibility and knowledge — what’s going on in one’s body or a terra landscape that’s been dug out from beneath and deposited on top. . .

SB: I’m very interested in an alchemical understanding of relationships and communication. I say alchemical, because in the development of alchemy, you had what would become the basis of science, but with it were many things which were not scientifically categorised. You had variables. There was more fluidity in alchemy than there can be in the contemporary sciences because it related to things which were questionably dark, going into magic, spiritualism. . . It’s a political thing, most of the time — what’s perceived as positive or negative. And I think it’s much healthier for us to not just be scientific objects. We need to be able to feel things. To say things which we mean. Even if it’s not what the socio-political world we live in wishes us to say. We still need to do it. Humans work on so many different levels and I think that, over time, certain types of communication which were natural for us have been left behind. We’ve forgotten how to use those channels. The world has gotten smaller. We are exposed to so much more than we were twenty, thirty, forty years ago. But I also think there were fundamental methods of communication which were hugely positive, which still express themselves through, say, art. Or certain instinctual behaviours. Varying demographics can look at visual arts and have a reaction that is their own. All individuals can have that interaction. It goes back to what you said about the individual or collective — even with societal influence, the individual can have an interaction which is their own. The more educated, potentially less so, but encouraging that type of communication between people, and people and objects, is something I am keen to push.

About twenty years ago I worked on a series called the Form series (2004 – 2011). It was a demarcation from a previous series of paintings and sculptures, the Disciple series, which I had been working on for about ten years. I felt that I had achieved everything I could with that series and made a move into the next one, but I wasn’t sure how to go through with this. I had been drawing, looking at things, reading. . . Along the way, there was this recurring form. I was pretty sure that I hadn’t seen it in my research, but it kept coming to me, and I started drawing it in sketchbooks and on large pieces of paper. I made some physical sculptures of it, but I never got it right. Every piece — and I did hundreds of works on paper and a bunch of three-dimensional sculptures — was aesthetically successful, but I couldn’t capture the correct form. It was good to do them, it was practice, and I suppose I had to do them to get it out, but at a certain point, when I became quite frustrated, I prepared some large canvases; two vine black panels, monochromes, which I knew would become the basis of the new series.

I’d been wanting to work with monochrome black paintings for quite a long time, and I’d always had a problem with the colour black, which came across as aggressive and dull. It didn’t feel alive. I started experimenting with this pigment that a friend put me onto. It was this really nice quality of vine black, where grape vines were collected and burnt. If you take the raw pigment of lamp black, bone black, or ivory black, each is slightly different. But if you take a small quantity and rub it between your thumb and finger it coats them entirely. If you take the same quantity of vine black it’s transparent, and it’s got a very, very subtle hint of blue. But even though it’s carbon black — because it’s burnt vines, so chemically, its molecular structure is the same as lamp black — it’s got a transparency to it. In order to get a very dense black you have to paint twenty to thirty coats. It’s a very interesting task, in-and-of itself, because the more dense it gets, the softer it gets, visually. I found that twenty-seven layers is the perfect amount because the light still goes into the black. It doesn’t just get absorbed. This black takes light in, it has a light. It almost looks velvet at a distance. So it looks black, but when you put something else black next to it, it has depth, whereas the rest just looks flat. That was fascinating, but to get back to what I was saying, I’d had this recurring form, but I never got it right. On the one hand was this frustration with the form; on the other, a sense of achievement with the black.

And this particular night, it was 11PM and I’d done everything I needed to do in my studio. For some reason I took one of the big panels — they were 189 x 149 cm — and laid it flat on the ground. I then took some lead white paint and went straight into this dark panel. You paint, so you know that going in white on black with a brush is likely to spray white a few millimetres in every direction, but I decided to just go in. I worked until 4AM and finally the right form was out. This was not a mathematical gesture, it was about allowing the form to come. I hadn’t been able to do that before. I was always trying to make the form.

SC: So again, looking for that instinctual. . .

SB: Yes, because I don’t find the work easy. I have to work very, very hard to get to a certain point where, if I’m lucky and I get into a certain rhythm, I can bypass my, not inhibitions, but enter into a different instinctual and cognitive reality. They go together. Plus, my motor skills are all working, so the instinct is also about muscle memory.

SC: It’s interesting that you say they need to be together, as if the mind and body were not one biological thing, you know? It’s like overthinking things, where you rely too much on the cognitive at the expense of motor memory; the head alone, as opposed to the two in tango. . .

SB: Yes. The key is in the allowance. Strangely, it’s much easier for children. For adults it somehow requires a special sort of courage. You’re exposing something inside yourself which is vulnerable and normally undetected. When the painting was finished, I was pleased with the work. But that wasn’t really the big thing, which then influenced a great deal of my approach to the future. I was happy with the Disciples series, and thought it had taken me quite far in some respects, but this new piece, which I didn’t know how to classify. . . When it was dry I put it up and I was pleased that, over a six month period, I’d been able to find the form. I just knew it was right, and that it had been wrong in all the previous iterations. The cool thing about this experience, which relates to the mastabas and this gentleman who came to visit, is that I knew I had done something which I was never capable of doing before. It was a major demarcation point. More so than I understood. At the same time, I was intrigued to know how people would react. I invited friends and my closest professional contacts to see the piece. Always on their own, one person at a time. They came up to my studio and expected to see a series of work but I showed them just one painting. I gave it a room on its own, and guided them in. Everyone who saw it had a strong reaction, which was really interesting in itself. Nobody really knew how to deal with the image. It was quite strange, and they didn’t have a visual reference for it. Everyone was, to a degree, polite. The reactions were basically two-fold. Nobody was passive in front of the physical object. When they were in this room, people either became very uncomfortable, to the point of getting a stomach ache, or they started laughing and were hugely happy. This was more perplexing for me than the other reaction.

I realised that although I was there, and I had invited them into my studio, their reactions had very little to do with me. I’d never seen such a focused division in a group of people. In the end, about forty people had experienced this subliminal communication. This in itself became more interesting than anything else. Most wanted to come back, to see if it would happen again. It didn’t happen with the same profundity the second time, but those who liked it loved it and those who felt uncomfortable didn’t feel nearly as bad on the second occasion. Their reactions were very human. So I was aware that there was this play between the painting, the form, the composition. . . Everything in there was having this effect, and I thought this was deeply interesting, but I couldn’t talk to these people about it. I tried to, but nobody could tell me about what had just happened to them.

I decided to try and do this more and find forms that work in this way. So the first form had sort of risen in my consciousness but I can’t say where it came from. I tried to reproduce it, I kept failing. Finally, it arrived, and it’s out, and I couldn’t say anything more than that. Then there was this reaction which made me want to go further. I decided to look into historical forms that I thought had resonance for myself, so I was now determining an entrance to this communication language through my instinct. This is entirely limiting because I’m just one person. Now, whether I would get forms that resonated was highly questionable, but that was my aim. There were twenty-seven forms.

SC: You’ve painted all in the top right of the canvas. Why?

SB: I decided that, compositionally, I wanted to continue with the top-right sector. I didn’t want to make beautiful paintings. Some are, but that was not the point. I wanted to keep it more analytic by keeping the form — whatever it was — in the top righthand corner and restricting the palette to black, white, red, and green. That was another subtext that goes back into alchemy.

SC: The chosen colours are interesting. Whether intentional or not, black, white, and red are widely used in political posters: it’s the language used to hit home, to get an emotive response. But was twenty-seven intentional too, in terms of the alphabet?

SB: No, I think that’s interesting, but I wasn’t trying to reproduce the alphabet. I wouldn’t say it’s chance, but it is. I developed these one at a time, so each has its own origin story for me. Unfortunately, the black-on-black paintings are quite hard to see, they’re most profound in reality, but. . .

SC: I like the not knowing aspect of it too, because a lot of the forms are familiar, but not. If we trace your trajectory from these paintings in 2004, to 2014, to now in 2024, the works that you’re making also involve a number of considerations; these parameters that you’ve set up for yourself. I know, for example, that in preparation for your residency this year you wanted to work solely with indigenous woods.

SB: The last few years were pretty weird for everyone. 2020 was a very important year for me, work wise. I had been planning to collaborate with several institutions in the US from April 2020, and had spent three years preparing to do this work. Then, in early 2020, everything changed, as it did for all of us, and none of what was planned could happen. It was a major blow, but the plus side was that it allowed me to step away from the planning and return to greater spontaneity in my work.

A neighbour, who I knew by sight but had never had a conversation with, saw me on the street. This was during lockdown. But this person came up to me and said, ‘I’ve heard you’re a sculptor.’ We’d never spoken, but he said ‘Look, I’ve got a cherry wood tree, which I’ve just cut down. I want to offer it to you. Can you use it?’ I went to see the tree and it was beautiful. I couldn’t figure out why he cut it down, but he said if I wanted the wood, I could have it. So I took ten pieces, which had all been pre-cut. They’re about the same size as what I’m working with now. I collected it, took it to my studio, and thought about what to do. I wasn’t sure but decided that because the wood wouldn’t weather well — it would dry out and crack — I should speed the cracking by removing the bark. Then I know where the wood is going and can decide how to react. I hadn’t stripped trees for years and years. It’s hard work. I was out of practice, but I started stripping them down and it was great to do. Just stripping the bark off all these pieces got me back into the physicality of it, because most of the recent work was conceptual, on the computer, in my sketchbooks. Now I was just working. There was no intellectual aspect to it. I put in hours, got exhausted, and wasn’t used to using the tools. I cut myself badly a number of times, had to go and get stitches. . . Once I got them stripped I started to realise that there were directions that I wanted to take things, and some of my research over the previous years, I had taken to a sort of fever pitch awareness of certain things, and I decided to stop all of that, but I couldn’t stop reading, so books and sketchbooks which I’d put away for ten or twelve years I now started to re-open. I was amazed how much of it coordinated with my work on the cherry wood pieces, that this coincidence was so well formed but I hadn’t seen it before.

I went further into it and started to research other materials which I wished to incorporate. This fitted with previous research. I took it to a point and elaborated the techniques of working with the wood and how I dealt with the wood’s behaviour, which I had to cater for. These evolved into an entirely new series, which is an evolution from the Mastaba series. So, phase one of the series, which was more a technical learning process, was the cherry wood. Then, coming into South Africa, I thought that everything that had fitted together in the final concept of the cherry wood pieces fits perfectly and can go far deeper here. This is also why, after the Mastabas, which were oak, it was brilliant to work with them but I always had this thing in me that, although I loved doing them, I had this instinct to work with indigenous wood. There’s a terrible snobbery in South Africa about wood. Most people might not see it, but there’s this thing that oak, and European, non-indigenous woods are the ultimate — they are the things you want to build into your house, make your furniture out of. But there are over 2000 species of indigenous trees in South Africa with vast potential for use. We should be over the moon about our indigenous trees. In European trees there’s a folkloric, medicinal, druidic history. One of my Form paintings relates to a story about a specific yew tree in Scotland, which was originally the oldest tree in Great Britain. It was a most important, sacred place in Scotland for the druids. It was crucial for the Romans, when they went to Scotland, to capture this tree, in order to capture that part of the country and subdue the people. But they never really managed. Trees in Europe are known to have certain medicinal values, but the trees in South Africa — it’s incredible what there is in these trees. In Europe you have twenty, thirty different types of trees which you can use for different things. We have over 2,000 here. And the qualities are mind-blowing.

SC: So you wanted to work with indigenous trees here because they’re not appreciated, on the one hand, and there’s a much larger diversity of trees that also have a wide variety of medicinal purposes?

SB: And because some of the trees are just. . . I’m a sculptor, so if we go back to totally practical terms, if I want to work with wood, I have to think about a number of details. There are things like, how susceptible is the wood to insects? How long do I want the work to last: ten years, fifteen years, five-hundred years? Where am I setting the parameters? How stable is it? How easily will it rot or break down? South Africa is the best country in the world for asking these questions. There are over 100 species of trees that have a built-in insecticide. Insects just will not go near them. Others will not rot. You can expose them to a constant flow of water, and they don’t deteriorate. There are fireproof woods. For me, they’re also practical things. The wood I wanted to work with is sneeze wood. It makes you sneeze violently and it’s not very pleasant to work with but it’s hard as hell and it lasts. It’s impervious to insects. Once it’s come to the form it’s supposed to be in, it will remain like that for 200, 300 years, with no effort. You can submerge it for those 200 years, and it’ll look the same. And then there are shamanic aspects to the woods, so they’re important for curative reasons and for reasons beyond just curative for human usage, for our health, but in the same way that Kaolin is, some are used as a pathway to ancestors, and to the afterlife. All of these things become interesting. So this is why I want to learn more and work with South African wood.