QUINTEN EDWARD WILLIAMS Movement and its limitation within an environment
Cover Image: Detail of Stucture and laceration, 2017, Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 150cm Right page image: Interrupted and pushed back, 2017, Acrylic on canvas, 200 x 200cm ISBN 9780994654038 Notes by the artist All images copyright the artist and David Krut Projects Artwork photographs by Thys Dullart Installation photographs by Thys Dullart, Amé Bell, and the artist Publication design by Amé Bell and the artist Project coordination by Elzette De Beer and Amé Bell With thanks to David Krut This catalogue was produced for the exhibtion Movement and its limitations within an environment, a project by Quinten Edward Williams at David Krut Projects Parkwood from August to October 2017.
Quinten Edward Williams quintenedwardwilliams.com
David Krut Projects 142A Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, Johannesburg, 2193, South Africa info-jhb@davidkrut.com l t. +27 (0)11 880 6368 Montebello Design Centre, 31 Newlands Avenue, Newlands, Cape Town, 7001 dkct@davidkrut.com l t. +27 (0)21 685 0676 526 W. 26th Street, Suite 816, New York, 10001, USA info@davidkrut.com l t. +1 (212) 255 3094 www.davidkrut.com
Movement and its limitation within an environment is a visual-spatial presentation which responds to the vibrancy of partaking in an assemblage, and to the ambivalence of living in a borderland.
Considering to walk up a staircase, 2017 Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 93cm 4
The movement of the city, and broader urbanrural relationships, viewed as an assemblage, is the becoming of human and non-human bodies: a material con guration that is constantly shifting along relationships of aect. While we may live our lives within these material-semiotic assemblages, our lives are constructed along dierent, but sometimes overlapping, borderlands. Movement is a normal part of human life, but it is not possible for everyone to move in the same way. People, however, can dream to live another life, one with another set of thresholds, in the same urban-rural assemblage. This life can happen in a dierent relationship to the visible and invisible barriers and blockages present in their current lives.
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It is seldom that the objects I make follow a direct route, or a highly planned sequence of steps to completion. A notion of sketching, being that of an observation which involves associations of informality and emergence through expressing, coding, and sensing is useful to understand this contextually bound making-thinking process. Making-thinking, through sketching, involves the continuous reassessment to codi cations, and adjustments to forms and relationships of aspects of assemblages.
Topographic view with superimposed elevation, 2017 Acrylic on canvas, 138 x 112cm Crossing, 2017 Acrylic on canvas, 138 x 112cm 6
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I have found that I work in series because the meaning in painting arises in part in the relationship between paintings, and the way they come together in an environment. This broad idea has in uenced my production over the last few years: from working in series of painting to working with series of painting as installations. When I started making installations I used my paintings to build structures. My conglomerations of paintings, however, have been moving towards a sculptural form for the last two years. While the arrangement of the sculpture in its relationship to other elements of an environment is important, a sculpture does not create an environment so much as create a presence within an environment. I am interested in what such a presence can do to in uence my painting, and my printing. The interfacing of these different disciplines, painting, printing, and sculpture, offers a vast area to explore. What would the percept and affect be that is opened through this encounter? That is something I want to see and experience.
Installation view of sculpture made of polystyrene, pigment, acrylic one, acrylic paint and of monotypes made from beeswax, dammar resin, pigment, spraypaint on Awagami Bamboo Printmaking 110gsm 12
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Sketches are sometimes considered to be a type of mediation that is not far removed from the original experience, but one entailing an expression, a coded message, or a sense that is still unworked into a nal form. Linked to the ideas that sketches are un nished or incomplete portrayals, there are the ideas that sketches are open to adjusting relationships, and are able to make visible previously unseen possibilities. Sketching, when understood metaphorically, can be considered a primary aspect of my image-object making process: I propose that my image-object making process could be characterised by the notions of informality, emergence, and possibility contained in the general understanding of the notion of sketching. This is a process of layering, and locking; of adjusting relationships; of coding details of the world. I am also starting to think that my paintings, sculpture, and prints are sketches for each other. I mean this in the sense that while there may be similarities in the forms made through painting, printing and sculpting, there are also material-conceptual properties in each form that can reveal, as a sketch, previously unseen opportunities for image-object making in one, or another form.
Installation view of monotypes made from beeswax, dammar resin, pigment, spraypaint on Awagami Bamboo Printmaking 110gsm, 76 x 56cm each 14
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Stepping out an area, 2017 Beeswax, dammar resin, pigment, spray paint, on Awagami Bamboo Printmaking 110gsm, 76 x 56cm Movement and its limitation within an environment
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Wall, 2017 Beeswax, dammar resin, pigment, spray paint, on Awagami Bamboo Printmaking 110gsm, 76 x 56cm Movement and its limitation within an environment
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Movement and its limitation within an environment is a visual-spatial presentation on a hypothetical, or possible, con guration of bodies, interrupted in the world, and the borderlands in which they nd themselves. It employs the notion of a sketching process through an interface between painting, sculpting and printing, and the aect these forms produce. The presentation oers a brief account, a tentative exploration, a provisional outline. The sketching process employed entails a movement between the painterly and the linear, and of opacities and translucencies. The sketches dwell on a sense of place, and an experience of place: they are speculative; they are arrangements of possible encounters; and they are expressions of the uncertainties entailed in a human relationship to place.
Structure and Laceration, 2017 Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 150cm 20
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The becoming of people and their intricate negotiations with people-place can sometimes entail as much profound contradiction as correspondence, and as much tension as solidarity: When do you have mobility in the world? What makes you a normalised person in the eyes of the state? What makes you a proper person in the eyes of a citizen? When do you belong to an African city? What is home? What are the clusters of in uence in which people nd themselves? How can people gain access to a humane life in an increasingly restricted world? How are these challenges dierent for people from dierent races and classes? I cannot answer these questions and I am not the rst to pose them. These questions, however, are at the heart of our imaginaries of life in a city that is constructed along multiple borderlands. This city. A borderland for me, and for you.
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References AnzaldĂşa, G. (2012). Borderlands. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Carter, P. (2004). Material thinking. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press. DeLanda, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society. London: Continuum. Malpas, J. (2010). Place and experience. New York, NY [u.a.]: Cambridge University Press.