I first met Walter Oltmann in June 2022, at his home in Kensington, Johannesburg, where he’s lived for the past twenty years. It was an informal visit, a chance to get to know one another, in the knowledge that we would soon work together. We knew this because Oltmann had just received the Edoardo Villa Extraordinary Award for Sculpture [1], and I had just been appointed as curator of the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture. As things go, this meant that we had to do something, but at the time we did not know what.

Construction on the Centre had just begun, and its ‘newness’ — the absence of an infrastructure or pre-existing blueprint — was both daunting and invigorating. In preperation for our meeting, I spent some time on Google, doing a bit of background reading. Eventually, I stumbled upon something of a holy grail, Oltmann’s PhD thesis: “In the Weave” (2017). [2] At the time, Mari Lecanides-Arnott and I were in the final stages of editing Bruce Murray Arnott: Into the Megatext (2023), [3] and the ideas expressed in it kept resurfacing as I read through Oltmann’s PhD. Both seemed to revolve around the idea of a continuum. In the case of Oltmann, this was articulated through Tim Ingold’s idea of an ‘ongoing generative movement,’ penned in relation to the act of weaving and described as a kind of ‘wayfaring’ that has less to do with the realisation of a premeditated image than it does an accumulation or ‘gathering’: an ‘improvisatory movement that works things out as it goes along.’ [4]

Arnott’s own reference to the continuum — the idea that ‘all sculptures are “points of entry” into the great sculptural megatext’ [5] — may not speak as directly to the making of a given artwork, but it does recognise their provisional nature, namely, that an artwork is not an end in-and-of itself, but a single thread in the ever-growing tapestry of cultural life, or as Ashraf Jamal put it, that ‘life, irrespective of where and when it is lived, is subject to a greater story.’ [6]

This sentiment sat well with me. In some sense, it resonated with the advice that Kabelo Malatsie gave me in 2019, while working towards my MA, that the exhibition need not be thought of as a ‘holy space’:

An exhibition can be a space where we illustrate ideas. An exhibition can be an expo. It’s not the thing. It’s where we show some of the thing. . . If your idea reads better in a different format than put your energies there. Make that. [7]

Her words also seemed to resonate with Oltmann’s writing. On the one hand, his attentiveness to the material — the desire to slow down, observe, listen; to be aware of the possibilities and limitations of the medium at hand. On the other, the understanding that what one makes is never finite but always provisional — ‘subject to a greater story.’

It was in these terms, too, that we began to speak about the possibilities ahead, understanding that we would need to let things unfold organically as the project progressed. Given that much of Oltmann’s thesis was about the process of slow, repetitive making (‘manual work and its philosophy’), [8] and that it engaged the work of other artists who worked with singular materials or in a similar way (Andries Botha, Sam Ntshangaze, Siemon Allen, Nicholas Hlobo, Tracey Rose, Moshekwa Langa, Igshaan Adams), [9] this felt like a fitting place to start.

We drew up a list, then another, of possible artists with whom we could initiate a series of conversations. The impulse was to understand what it was about this mode of making that attracted different artists; how each responded to the materials that they use; to what extend their process might lead the conceptualisation of their work; and the extent to which their experiences might overlap or diverge.

While our mode of enquiry may feel rather niche, the conversations about process and material — about techne (the how, rather than the why) [10] — fast became a way of thinking through the broader philosophical questions inherent to each artist’s practice, and it wasn’t long before we began to toy with the idea of an exhibition that brought these ideas to life in a more tangible way.

Cognisant that ‘We do not have to think the world in order to live in it, but we do have to live in the world in order to think it,’ [11] the exhibition, A Quiet Focus (2022–3), provided an opportunity for audiences to not only engage with each artist’s work but to experiment with the ‘raw’ materials that they use, in order to feel and experience them on a sensory level and come to understand how such materials might shape the creative process. To this end, the exhibition included a number of Oltmann’s works in progress, Usha Seejarim’s Nesting (2019) [12] and Crevice (2021), and Chris Soal’s Till we have faces (2020), A tale for the time being (2021), and As below so above (2021). Barring the broomheads used to make Nesting, we included boxes filled with aluminium wire, clothes’ pegs, toothpicks, and bottletops. Later, when Inga Somdyala took up residence, Asikho Ndawo (2019) was included during a workshop with students from the Universities of Johannesburg and Pretoria, [13] and a fifth material, paper, was added to the fold.

Coupled with the conversations, the works on exhibition make apparent how such processes of fabrication might, after Paula Owen, ‘reframe the relationship between artist, object and viewer.’ [14] For example, all of the artworks that were on show are labour intensive, comprised of materials that are used in everyday life. In each, process does not simply disappear when the work is made, but is embedded as an integral part of the whole. Questions like ‘How long did that take?’ or ‘Wait, are those toothpicks?’ were commonplace. One follows the weft and warp of wire from one point to the next, or senses a transformation in the ‘use’-value of the materials used.

The more time I spent with these artworks and played with the materials, the more I was drawn to Hannah Arendt’s reflections on labour, work, and action (vita activa), and the distinctions that she draws between them. [15] For Arendt, labour is conceived in bodily terms, as an ‘activity’ that corresponds to the biological processes of ‘growth, metabolism, and eventual decay.’ [16] Through labour, ‘vital necessities’ are ‘produced and fed into the life process. . .’ [17] Production and consumption are integral insofar as they enable and facilitate life’s cycle. Thus, one labours to put food on the table or to give birth, following ‘the circular movement of our bodily functions.’ Labour does not come ‘to an end as long as life lasts,’ adds Arendt, but is ‘endlessly repetitive.’ [18]

For me, her words seemed to open up alternate readings of each artist’s work, pointing towards unforeseen connections. In Oltmann’s case, it got me thinking about his more direct references to birth, sleep, and death; symbiosis and metamorphosis. All underscore the cyclical processes of life in its varied forms, yet Oltmann’s use of repetitive hand-based craft also feeds this cyclical loop, making labour an active and ever-present ingredient in the make-up of his work. As notes Elizabeth Burroughs in her contribution, “A Discrete Delight,” ours is a world that has become wholly mechanised, to the point where

. . . none of us consider the time, materials, machinery, the mental and physical effort that go into the manufacture of the cloth for a T-shirt and its subsequent fabrication, or into the balletic production of a BMW by a swarm of robots. We purchase the end product without any sense of what it took to create it. [19]

Her observation could also serve as a backdrop to contextualise works by Seejarim and Soal, both of whom source materials from the end of the production line. Arendt describes such materials as ‘use-objects’ — tools and technologies that relieve us from the burden of labour. Unlike the fruits of labour, use-objects are said to correspond to the ‘unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle.’ Work, she adds, ‘provides an “artificial” world of things,’ that might enable some sanctum of stability. ‘Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all.’

Associations to shelter — be it a home, shell, nest, cocoon, exoskeleton, coat of fur, costume — recur in each artist’s ouevre, and while the objects themselves are often destined for the home and may be conceived as a part of this artificial corpus, they nonetheless trouble our understanding of the home as a space of comfort and stability.

Seejarim and Soal, for example, both employ use-objects as ‘raw’ materials, yet they also repurpose (or ‘re-cycle’) them. ‘No thing is wholly useless,’ Ashraf Jamal reminds us in his contribution, “Alongly,” ‘But it is not only the utility of things that matter.’ Writing elsewhere about Seejarim’s ability to reinvent the wheel, to congitively skew our preconceptions, he notes how, when ‘applied en masse,’ her clothes pegs assume a position that is significantly and intentionally other: ‘It is not that a peg appears and repeats itself as a thing in the world, or because it serves as an imaginative trope, but simply because it is a thing, encountered as though for the first time.’ So doing, Seejarim’s abstractions destabilise any sense of order or comfort that such objects might ordinarily inspire.

In her essay, “Neither Fish Nor Fowl,” originally published in Oltmann’s catalogue for In the Weave, Brenda Schmahmann explores the place of the uncanny — a term ‘derived from the German word unheimlich, which means literally “unhomely,”’ — in Oltmann’s work, most notably Silverfish (1997), and how such creatures, through their insistent presence, threaten our understanding of the home as a space of order, shelter, and protection. Furthermore, Schmahmann highlights how the fishmoth, in its taste ‘for the starches found in book bindings, for foodstuffs such as coffee and sugar. . . cotton, linen, and other fabrics,’ might make tangible that which has been supressed. She draws on a text by Elizabeth Wright, for whom:

The familiar, the heimlich, is the result of the apparently successful orderings we have made of the world, but because the secret and the private (the other sense of heimlich), also enters into these orderings, the objects we think we have singled out might fail us at any time. [20]

This, too, is Seejarim’s point. Like Oltmann, hers is a ‘confounding of categories.’ Yet one could say the same for Soal’s use of toothpicks. As notes Norman Klein, all collections, databases, archives, disguise a ‘haunted ideology’:

We are given a construction, but allowed to also see the bones of the house. . . Rarely does a researcher find the heart of the matter in a collection. More likely, the heart has been consumed or partially removed. Otherwise, the collection would not have survived. It is like a plate of food after it has been eaten. We study the plate for signs of what was eaten. [21]

In his conversation with Oltmann, Soal recounts the origins of his interest in toothpicks: ‘I wanted to tap into the fact that these toothpicks, these little slivers of wood, go into all of these unseen places. There was something about reaching into those spaces and pulling out the muck that I quite like. . .’ As with Oltmann’s Silverfish, the mix of morbid fascination and repulsion is key. Similarly, when speaking to Oltmann about her shift in focus, from the everyday routines of a student to that of a mother, Seejarim mentions an early video work in which she brushes her teeth for two hours straight. The gesture is both excessive and obsessive, playful and paranoid. It reminds me of Schmahmann’s reflections on the archive, and our need for them. Writing in reference to Jacques Derrida’s aptly titled Archive Fever (1996), she observes how the production and maintence of the archive ‘may be directed less at enabling remembering than at facilitating forgetfulness.’ In both, the will to sanitation and order is marked not only by that which is preserved but that which is expunged.

This is also relevant when thinking about the work of Inga Somdyala, concerned as his is with memory and processes of erasure, be it through the education system or otherwise. In Asikho Ndawo, the artist cuts the Road Atlas Map of South Africa into hundreds of neatly stacked rectangles before folding them into little paper boats and stringing them together to resemble something akin to a fishing net or fender. The allusions are endless. What was once static — fixed, finite, definitive, certain — is now unhinged; the logic of the map disturbed.

Importantly, Somdyala talks about a kind of intimacy that emerges through the folding process. Touch, the strange relationship it sets up between proximity and distance, is one thing. Another is the chance encounter with words, familiar and strange. The name of a town emerges in the fold that evokes a string of childhood memories or captures his curiosity, leading to a deep dive on the internet and a series of excited ‘Did you know?’ remarks to friends. Not discounting the context in which they’re made (primarily at home on the couch, or in bed watching movies), it’s the kind of process that makes roadtripping interesting, and that imbues an otherwise alien data field with personal significance. In this, his is both a de- and refamiliarisation; a way of making something one’s own whilst pointing to processes of conquest and segregation. The boat is, of course, an apt vessel through which to explore such ideas, if only for its associations to colonial conquest on the one hand, and childhood memory on the other.

Like Oltmann, what matters is not so much the end product but the possibilities afforded through the making. In this, Somdyala describes the sale of Asikho Ndawo as somewhat bittersweet: ‘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.’ [22] Like Seejarim’s nests, it is the iterative nature of Somdyala’s boats — the many ways in which they can be strung, stacked, arranged, held — that lends them their liberatory appeal. This is why all of the artists gravitate towards the same materials, over and over, developing their vocabulary in ways that enable and enrich the broader corpus of their work. ‘By itself the peg is quite rigid, but when you join them together they soften. They’re skin like. I can bend and curl them,’ notes Seejarim. ‘A peg by itself can’t do that, but as a multiple it can. So it’s about exploring what they can be when they’re together. In the same way that a thread on its own is very different to cloth. Cloth is magic.’ [23] Much the same could be said for the work of each of our wayfarers. Every end is a beginning.

ENDNOTES 

1. The Edoardo Villa Extraordinary Award for Sculpture was initiated by the Claire & Edoardo Villa Will Trust in 2016, intended to facilitate and aid the production of sculptural practice in South Africa, and made in recognition of exceptional achievement. Previous recipients include Nicholas Hlobo, Willem Boshoff, William Kentridge, and a post-humous award to Jackson Hlungwani.

2. The exhibition title is drawn from Julia Meintjes’s essay, “The Constant Craftsman” (2013: 20) in which she writes ‘There is a deeply constant quality about this craftsman, not only because of his meditative method of making, but also in his groundedness. His perceptual mindfulness manifests as a quiet focus.’

3. Arendt also appears in Oltmann’s thesis, in a footnote that addresses the ‘distinctiveness of art in relation to other forms of work’ (2017: 24).

4. In his thesis, Oltmann cites Howard Risatti (2007: 99) in saying that ‘the term techne comes from the Greek and refers “to the knowledge of how to do or make things (as opposed to why things are the way they are). But more generally “techne” denotes a body of procedures and skills”’ (2017: 3).

5. Thanks to Johan Thom (University of Pretoria) and Gordon Froud (University of Johannesburg) for their assistance in organising the workshop.