Mary Wafer. Didn't you love the part right before they died (2010) Oil on canvas. 1800x3000mm.
"One of the recurring threads in my work is the notion of visibility and invisibility, concrete and conceptual visibility, evidence of existence, ways of belonging to and possessing the physical and imagined spaces we occupy. The overwhelmingly challenging materiality of these spaces demands a constant navigation, attention and vigilance, a perpetual re-negotiation and re-interpretation of the particular imagined and real spaces we occupy. I am attracted to spaces that are elusive and ambivalent, always just out of reach, the cruel, brutal eroticism of concrete and darkness. For me painting is a conceptual practice that operates as a platform for investigating social and urban realities. Painting offers the possibility of both building up complex layers of meaning and signification, and at the same time the possibility of subtraction and distillation, enabling suggestions of real and imaged absences and presences. I use my own photographs as preliminary sketches for my paintings: the initial photograph and my subsequent abstraction represent a layered approach to inducing visibility, and reveals the multiple levels of mediation that frame the experience of an urban ‘reality’. By this I mean that I attempt, through my paintings to reveal that which is not visible through a purely representational image. The images are initially captured by the camera and then re-thought, re-invested by the paintbrush. Because of this possibility of multiple layers of signification, and the processes of
distillation and layering of information, I believe that painting can function as a theoretical and political practice in which the act of making visible is a political act against invisibility."
-Mary Wafer
Mary Wafer is considered to be one of South Africa’s most exciting emerging painters. Wafer’s work functions in-between traditional painterly concerns and strong contemporary interests related to the urban landscape. She completed her Masters degree in Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2007, and lives and works in Johannesburg.
