Tag: writing

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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.

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Writing

Design and Futures

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 ⁣⁣

SPACECRAFT XW01 2019
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