Writing – Ralph Borland Studio

In early 2019 studio lead Ralph Borland was asked if he would contribute an article on the theme of ‘Design and Futures’ to a special edition of the Journal of Futures Studies.

I wrote the article while in the thick of working on Dubship I – Black Starliner, a @spacecraft.africa project, in bursts late at night and early in the morning after working on the sculpture, thinking ‘why do I do this to myself?!’ but I was very happy with the result. Thanks to the editors Cher Potter and Stuart Candy for inviting me! I couldn’t resist the opportunity to write about my work in the context of futures studies, a really fascinating field, and there was a pleasing resonance in working at the same time on a sculpture which combines future vision with 800 years of technological history.
Ralph Borland’s Instagram post

The article is titled ‘SPACECRAFT: A Southern Interventionist Art Project’ in Volume 23 no.4 June 2019 of the Journal of Futures Studies. It is freely accessible online at jfsdigital.org ⁣⁣

There is pleasure in writing catalogue essays for artists – at the best of times it becomes a collaboration with the artist and their work, revealing aspects of the work that the artist may not have fully articulated even to themselves, as well as assisting them in communicating the concerns of their art to a public. It requires the work of a detective, conducting a deep reading of and engagement with the art works, and the work of an artist, willing to make word pictures and word sculptures for the reader.

Ralph Borland is proud of the results of this process in his catalogue essay for the sculptor Michele Mathison, for his exhibition Manual at What If The World gallery in Cape Town in 2015. View a pdf of the text here, and see a small extract below.

In ‘Dig down’, dozens of bare-metal spades with hard black-rubber handles dig and scrape at the ground, fused together in a multiple-exposure of work – turning now left, now right, forward and back, up and down. They are a condensed expression of a few minutes of labour, made monument – a sculptural expression of a work and motion study. In their hardness and their military tones, worn metal, they hint at the violence of work: this exertion, this digging and scraping, this biting into and relocating of unseen earth.
Manual, Ralph Borland (2015)