Chris Soal, Relic, 2019 - 2021
thateclectic.medium.com/palimpsest-chris-soals-sculptures...
Palimpsest: Chris Soal’s Sculptures Reveal Many Meanings
By Drew Haller
The City’s Echoing Voice
About 40 minutes away from the centre of Johannesburg, you will find a gated park. Unlike the sprawling liveliness of the country’s urban hub, this park is quiet, curated and composed. The only audible noises are those of laughing children, picnicking families, and chirping birds. Nirox Sculpture Park is a landscape of reprieve. Sitting at the border of what is known as the Cradle of Humankind in Kromdraai Rd, its meandering visitors are presented with an opportunity to remove themselves from the polarized chaos of the city, and contemplate the transient world of art in nature.
But the park’s close proximity to urbanity holds room for great tension. The outside world calls out loudly, asking for recognition, reminding us that its suffrage was the impetus for many of the exhibitions’ genesis. Alongside creators like St John Fuller and The Real DMZ Project curated by Sunjung Kim, Chris Soal channels the voice of the cosmopolitan world into the space. Soal, a renowned South African sculpture artist, is the youngest artist to have been exhibited by Nirox Sculpture Park. His installation, forming part of the Margins of Error exhibition, reflects this dichotomy between the organic landscape and man-made infrastructure with a prophetic sense of awareness.
Palimpsest
These looming installations are a palimpsest: an object that bears traces of its earlier form, a piece whose identity is defined by its nostalgic precursor and its present reality, a work defined by its history. As you stroll through the start of Nirox’s maze, Relic (2019- 2021) is one of the first pieces to catch your eye. Made of glass fibre, concrete and rebar, it stands 25 feet tall, with small breakages surrounding it. The grass grows slowly around the heavyweight of fallen fissures. Weaving through the fractured concrete and the long-standing poles, the visitor will initially believe that the totemic structure has collapsed. But on closer observation, one wonders about the intentionality of the striking installation, whose brutalist figure disrupts the softness of the natural world.
Relic. The word’s Latin root means remnants, leftovers, residue. In Roman Catholicism, the word is associated with the venerated objects that a holy person has left behind. The sculpture appears venerable too, sanctified by human ingenuity. This mysterious Stonehenge-like monument alludes to the debris of the cosmopolitan Gauteng valley, where the boundaries of our homes are defined by high walls and metal frames, all outlined by tarmac and accompanying potholes. Except, in this scenario, the concrete is overwhelmed by the neighbouring flora. The installation appears as evidence of humanity’s frail and unsustainable legacy. Soal understands them as a “future prophecy of human hubris, overconsumption and neglect. It’s this kind of warning that we’re on a path to destruction”.
The looming concern of human heritage comes at a time when South Africans, and all global citizens, are being forced to consider humanity’s impression on the environment. The dynamic, urban nerve-centres — which once characterized our unimaginable capacity to engineer new livelihoods, control the economy and manage development — now represent the cause of rising temperatures, accumulating waste, poverty, and unprecedented materialism. It brings the visitor to consider the impending decay we leave in our wake — how consolidated power can too be dismantled and eroded. Relic is a quiet demonstration of our disposable attitude to existence, that seems to ask “Are our legacies expendable?”
Accidents, Residue and Resonance
In explaining the origins of Relic — which Soal deems the “Petrified forest of the future” — he recalled the omnipresence of concrete in his childhood and adolescence. “There’s been this history of me working with concrete as a way of feeling my way through the city.” Having grown up in the tar metropolis, he identified the city in correspondence with the industrial fabric, which he named a “defining medium”. During his studies at the University of Wits, Soal made sculptures where he instinctively combined concrete and rebar. The first was a figurehead of his friend’s image; the construction of a corporeal human presence using inorganic material fascinated him.Later, in his submission for the 2018 PPC Imaginarium Award,the brutalist material reminded him of his childhood playing soccer in concrete ‘parks’ where he would scratch his knees to bits, and the soccer ball would take on the shape, colour and texture of its harsh playing field. This resonance with concrete seemed clear in these pieces, but Relic was different. Soal became more interested in the remains of the concrete structures, rather than their substance.
Chris Soal, Relic, 2019 - 2021
thateclectic.medium.com/palimpsest-chris-soals-sculptures...
Palimpsest: Chris Soal’s Sculptures Reveal Many Meanings
By Drew Haller
The City’s Echoing Voice
About 40 minutes away from the centre of Johannesburg, you will find a gated park. Unlike the sprawling liveliness of the country’s urban hub, this park is quiet, curated and composed. The only audible noises are those of laughing children, picnicking families, and chirping birds. Nirox Sculpture Park is a landscape of reprieve. Sitting at the border of what is known as the Cradle of Humankind in Kromdraai Rd, its meandering visitors are presented with an opportunity to remove themselves from the polarized chaos of the city, and contemplate the transient world of art in nature.
But the park’s close proximity to urbanity holds room for great tension. The outside world calls out loudly, asking for recognition, reminding us that its suffrage was the impetus for many of the exhibitions’ genesis. Alongside creators like St John Fuller and The Real DMZ Project curated by Sunjung Kim, Chris Soal channels the voice of the cosmopolitan world into the space. Soal, a renowned South African sculpture artist, is the youngest artist to have been exhibited by Nirox Sculpture Park. His installation, forming part of the Margins of Error exhibition, reflects this dichotomy between the organic landscape and man-made infrastructure with a prophetic sense of awareness.
Palimpsest
These looming installations are a palimpsest: an object that bears traces of its earlier form, a piece whose identity is defined by its nostalgic precursor and its present reality, a work defined by its history. As you stroll through the start of Nirox’s maze, Relic (2019- 2021) is one of the first pieces to catch your eye. Made of glass fibre, concrete and rebar, it stands 25 feet tall, with small breakages surrounding it. The grass grows slowly around the heavyweight of fallen fissures. Weaving through the fractured concrete and the long-standing poles, the visitor will initially believe that the totemic structure has collapsed. But on closer observation, one wonders about the intentionality of the striking installation, whose brutalist figure disrupts the softness of the natural world.
Relic. The word’s Latin root means remnants, leftovers, residue. In Roman Catholicism, the word is associated with the venerated objects that a holy person has left behind. The sculpture appears venerable too, sanctified by human ingenuity. This mysterious Stonehenge-like monument alludes to the debris of the cosmopolitan Gauteng valley, where the boundaries of our homes are defined by high walls and metal frames, all outlined by tarmac and accompanying potholes. Except, in this scenario, the concrete is overwhelmed by the neighbouring flora. The installation appears as evidence of humanity’s frail and unsustainable legacy. Soal understands them as a “future prophecy of human hubris, overconsumption and neglect. It’s this kind of warning that we’re on a path to destruction”.
The looming concern of human heritage comes at a time when South Africans, and all global citizens, are being forced to consider humanity’s impression on the environment. The dynamic, urban nerve-centres — which once characterized our unimaginable capacity to engineer new livelihoods, control the economy and manage development — now represent the cause of rising temperatures, accumulating waste, poverty, and unprecedented materialism. It brings the visitor to consider the impending decay we leave in our wake — how consolidated power can too be dismantled and eroded. Relic is a quiet demonstration of our disposable attitude to existence, that seems to ask “Are our legacies expendable?”
Accidents, Residue and Resonance
In explaining the origins of Relic — which Soal deems the “Petrified forest of the future” — he recalled the omnipresence of concrete in his childhood and adolescence. “There’s been this history of me working with concrete as a way of feeling my way through the city.” Having grown up in the tar metropolis, he identified the city in correspondence with the industrial fabric, which he named a “defining medium”. During his studies at the University of Wits, Soal made sculptures where he instinctively combined concrete and rebar. The first was a figurehead of his friend’s image; the construction of a corporeal human presence using inorganic material fascinated him.Later, in his submission for the 2018 PPC Imaginarium Award,the brutalist material reminded him of his childhood playing soccer in concrete ‘parks’ where he would scratch his knees to bits, and the soccer ball would take on the shape, colour and texture of its harsh playing field. This resonance with concrete seemed clear in these pieces, but Relic was different. Soal became more interested in the remains of the concrete structures, rather than their substance.