BURDEN, 2015
Bronze on Steel base
Edition of 12
1070 x 400 x 600 mm
+/- 49 kg bronze
This sculptural piece speaks to the journey of an aggregated life: the body as vessel shaped and burdened by a colonial past (referring to an infliction of hardship and distress, the guilt of privilege, the shipwrecked hopes of the artist as a contemporary white South African male).
The green patinated bronze bust leans forward to support a wooden mass on his left shoulder: a piercing cross, a broken mast; remnants of a lived and inherited past. DH Lawrence’s Tortoise Shout comes to mind: “Why were we crucified into sex? Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves, / As we began, / As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?”
As a stoic the figure supports, is and becomes the weight of Burden itself.
