In Conversation: Quinten Williams & Mary Wafer by Quinten Williams and Mary Wafer


Williams & Wafer - featured image-72dpi

In November 2012, Quinten Williams and Mary Wafer spent some time at David Krut Print Workshop in Johannesburg working on series of monotypes. Presented here as two separate bodies of work in conversation, the installation intends to emulate and highlight the productive role conversation and collaboration play in the workshop environment.

In his artistic practice Quinten Williams is primarily concerned with complexity, the formation of environments and art’s capacity to illustrate, navigate and explicate movements through unpredictability and uncertainty. Williams’ work could be seen as a detail or cross-section taken from a larger whole: the images themselves seem to resist the boundaries of the page or canvas, resisting easy categorisation, using abstraction to hint at images, spaces, and structures unfolding beyond view, complexity created through repetition and elaboration.  This approach has led to an interest in installation and performance where the work, the space and the body of the viewer are brought into intersection and become complicit in the art-making process and the exploration of physical environments and psychological or philosophical spaces.

Mary Wafer is also concerned in her practice with the relationship between physical and psychological space, and has for many years been generally occupied with the notion of space and its role in the formation of identity. Wafer is acutely aware of, and compelled by, an abstract sense of anxiety and fear, and the manner in which it manifests in visual and spatial experience. Wafer has merged this unease with her understanding of physical space as an allegorical site for the imagination of self. This body of monotypes imply the interiors of parking lot basements – crepuscular spaces which encourage the proliferation of ominous thoughts in the imagination. Lines of perspective glide out of frame, compelling the viewer to construct the space beyond the image itself – a technique inferring a creative re-construction of space through memory and imagination. Wafer’s delicate and complex renditions of physical structures, some containing a hint of the presence of figures, become symbolic representations of the architecture of anxiety.

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