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)
