Tag: sculpture

Categories
Writing

Bone Flute

From 2021 – 2023 I was a research fellow in the Future Hospitals project at HUMA – The Institute for Humanities in Africa at University of Cape Town. I contributed to this Pan-African research project investigating the use of new technologies in healthcare in Africa, with my project Bone Flute: a collaboration with an orthopaedic surgeon in a public hospital in Cape Town to produce a flute from a 3D-printed replica of my femur, obtained by medical scan.

A short film from the project made in collaboration with Dara Kell

You can read more about the project, which I presented in my exhibition AIAIA – Aesthetic Interventions in Artificial Intelligence in Africa in fulfilment of my research post, on the project website boneflute.org, where I describe the entwinement of my personal experience as a medical patient during the course of my fellowship, with my research and artwork. The result is a story combining these threads, which you can read on the site.

The website text is drawn in part from a book chapter titled ‘Bone Flute: An Art-Science Research Project‘ (click the title to download a copy) exploring this combination of art-science, research and storytelling which I wrote for the series Biomedical Visualisation, in the 6th edition edited by Leonard Shapiro, published by Springer in September 2024.

Categories
Sculpture

Jetty Square

In 2005 Earthworks Landscape Architects (ELA) invited me to work on the design for a new public space in Cape Town’s foreshore – land that was reclaimed from the sea within the last century. I produced a group of ghost shark sculptures, that swim through air 3 metres above the ground, pivoting to point into the wind like weathervanes. They emerge from a cobble pattern of stylised water swirls, designed by Diekie van Nieeuwenhuizen of ELA.

The sculptures make a sound when a strong wind blows, through wind-flutes built into their gills. I worked with the musician Brendon Bussy to design and make the flutes, and on the arrangements of tones across the sculptures. They have infrared sensors in their hollow noses, which move the flutes into position when a person passes below the shark. This layer of interaction is not operational; the square is not yet connected to the City’s electricity supply grid. The flutes are fixed ‘on’ at present, so if you visit the square on a windy day, you’ll hear the sharks sing. Cape Town gets very windy, especially in our springtime.

For more visit www.jettysquare.co.za

Categories
Writing

Manual

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)
Dig down, Michele Mathison 2014
Categories
Kruskal Avenue Sculpture

Starling wind mobiles

Across the site, sculptures of Red-Winged Starlings rotate in the wind on top of striped poles. These starlings are clever and resourceful birds at home in nature or in the city, and found all down the East Coast of Africa from Somalia to Cape Town. Along with the grasses outside Elizabeth Park, both artworks draw playful attention to small natural elements of the space that might otherwise be overlooked, and reflect to the people who inhabit the site their own resourcefulness and tenacity as they go about their daily lives.

Categories
Kruskal Avenue Sculpture

Giant grasses

Giant grasses form an entrance to Elizabeth Park: they celebrate the persistence of nature in the city, monumentalizing the tiny grasses that grow up through cracks in the pavement. The work represents tenacity and fruitfulness, and flourishing on little. Along with the starling wind mobiles, both artworks draw playful attention to small natural elements of the space that might otherwise be overlooked, and reflect to the people who inhabit the site their own resourcefulness and tenacity as they go about their daily lives.