Future Mythology
Everard Read Cape Town | 11 May – 1 June 2022
Future Mythology is the result of intuitive blends of iconography from ancient civilizations, popular culture and futurism, which Van Wyk uses to question established traditions. The artist explains: “I create alternative portrayals of encounters and experiences in order to wonder about the possibilities to come.”
For Van Wyk, the process begins with clouds: “Commemorating days that are significant by photographing the clouds mapped across the sky on that day, I then create sketches of these temporary forms, capturing their essential shapes in watercolour. My art-making is self-reflexive. It is both ritualistic and a method of connecting to my unconscious.”
By employing modes of association, Van Wyk begins to identify formal structures within the shapes, developing them into multi-dimensional art objects. The translation into object functions as praxis, the cyclic relation between theory and practice. Through this process of archiving her memories there is for the artist a documentation of meaningful moments both socio-political and personal. The manner in which she navigates space, time and consciousness in this body of work is in part informed by the cosmological symbolism of ancient cultures and religions – the lenses of myth and possibility. References include Homer’s Odyssey, Kabbala and Nordic goddess Freyja’s use of seiðr, a form of magic related to the telling and shaping of the future.
Through these various influences, Van Wyk explores the concept of weaving one’s own fate. By envisioning the future and then creating a present version of it in the production of her sculptural future mythologies, “the artworks can be seen as tools for the practice of seiðr. They can be interpreted as road signs in the journey from an inner to the outer world.”
In this series, the larger sculptures are made using jelutong wood and oil paint. Jelutong’s softness is conducive to carving. With a background in cabinet making, Van Wyk consciously turned towards the organic medium of wood in an effort to steer away from hazardous materials such as fibreglass. This choice resonates with her exploration around a circular economy, post-futures and the current climate crisis.
In turn, by incorporating softer materials and stitching in some of the works, the artist deliberately connects to so-called feminine techniques. This approach sits in contrast with the traditional masculine associations of the other mediums used (namely wood carving, and casting in bronze and concrete). These dual approaches are in conversation with each other across the body of work, contributing to what Judith Butler “the gender complexity”, where normative gender constructs are challenged and expanded.
Another subversion is found in the sculptures’ bases. The base for each bronze piece is poured concrete mixed with Duralatex. The shapes have been specifically cast from a variety of domestic food containers. Van Wyk aims here to negate the inherent function of these receptacles by moulding concrete within them.
The artist further explains: “I locate my art-making in the post-truth (truth being ‘a matter of assertion’) and myth-making embedded in the Anthropocene. The current Information Age in particular intersects with past and future epochs. This latest body of work is an attempt to contribute towards new narratives by imagining potential structures and shapes to explore new frontiers of knowledge and future worlds.”
The importance of forgetting: a timeline of existence
Cubicle Series at Everard Read Cape Town / Circa Gallery | 5 – 17 August 2019
In this exhibition Sophia van Wyk focuses on five personal memories:
Memory One: She participated in the The Falconer Foundry artist residency in KwaZulu-Natal for March, April and July in 2017. At the residency she developed and created a series of bronze artworks.
Memory Two: As part of a collaborative performance piece with Spanish artist, Mar Guerrero, van Wyk visited the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) outside of Carnarvon in the Karoo during November 2017. During the road trip to SKA they stayed over in Richmond at Modern Art Projects – South Africa where they engaged in various performance art pieces with the Karoo landscape as backdrop.
Memory Three: On 17 October 2018 van Wyk arrived at the Charles du Gaulle Airport to participate in the L’Air Arts residency in Paris.
Memory Four: During the L’Air art Residency in Paris van Wyk visited with German friend, Sina Eckhoff, and viewed the Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation on 19 October 2018.
Memory Five: On 19 October 2018 van Wyk took a boat trip with Sina on the Sein river in Paris.
Van Wyk’s paintings, sculptures and photographs flit and coalesce between these five memories. She works from photos taken on specific days then develops drawings to construct paintings and sculptures.
These artworks act as proxies for the memories and become semiotic ‘signs’. In semiotics, a ‘sign’ stands in for something other than itself. The ‘signified’ is the concept it represents. Van Wyk attaches the concept of a specific constructed memory to each artwork. Creating a ‘sign’ through an artwork is a way of archiving the memory and creating a coded visual language with these ‘signs’. Van Wyk constructs her paintings by layering and editing shapes. The sculpture forms are constructed similarly. This process is akin to the construction of a memory where one has agency in what one chooses and is able to remember. The shapes in the paintings are organic, unclear and unidentifiable, alluding to the struggled recollection of a hazy memory.
Van Wyk’s archiving of memories through her artworks is comparable to the digital Cloud that archives electronic information. She also uses clouds to create forms in her sculptures with strategies of automatism, chance and association. Sigmund Freud’s theory of memory is described by Worby and Ally (2013:463) as the “mnemonic architecture of psyche … [which] rests on the complex, inextricable interworking of memory as recollection and repression, as remembering and forgetting.”
Van Wyk’s obsession with memory and of archiving memories is reminiscent of the Jorge Luis Borges’s ([1962] 2007) short story “Funes the Memorious”. The lead character Ireneo Funes does not have the capacity to forget. Borges ([2007:65) finds that “this remembering without forgetting is monstrous”. Borges explains that “Funes’s mind becomes a useless mental catalogue of his memory” ([1962] 2007:65). Borges concludes the short story with “imagination requires forgetting, and that thought itself requires both memory and oblivion” (2007:20).
With regards to memory the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus (2013:[sp]) found that: [M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn’t true. Our memories are constructive. They’re reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.
Within Loftus’s (2013[sp]) research she hypothesises memory as constructed, deeply subjective and edited. Van Wyk’s recollection of her memories act not as nostalgia, but rather as momento mori and a timeline of existence.
Sources consulted
Kundera, M. 1996. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: A Novel. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
Loftus, E. 2013. How reliable is your memory? [O]. Available:
Accessed on 6 February 2018.
Mattera, D. 1987. Memory is the Weapon. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.
McClintock, A. 1990. “‘The Very House of Difference’: Race, Gender and the Politics of South
African Women’s Narrative in Poppie Nongena”. Social Text 25 (26):196-226.
Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation. 2019. [O]. Available
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9morial_des_Martyrs_de_la_D%C3%A9portation
Accessed on 11 February 2018.
Memorial of the Martyrs of the Deportation. 2019. [O]. Available
https://en.parisinfo.com/paris-museum-monument/71195/Memorial- des-Martyrs-de-la-Deportation
Accessed on 8 February 2018.
Everything you wanted to know about the SKA. 2019. [O]. Available
http://www.ska.ac.za/about/faqs/#toggle-id-2
Accessed on 11 February 2018.
Worby, E & Ally, S . 2013. The disappointment of nostalgia:conceptualising cultures of memory in contemporary South Africa. Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, 39:3, 457-480.
Archival Sky
Hazard Gallery | 14 October – 12 November 2017
Video work:
In this exhibition, Sophia van Wyk has captured significant moments, both socio-political and personal. Her art practice is ritualistic and a method of connecting to her subconscious. On significant days in her life Van Wyk documents shapes of moving clouds through photographs, film and sketches, then archives it through her art. Her forms are developed by strategies of automatism, chance and association. She creates subversive biomorphic sculptural and painted shapes garnered from her interaction with the world.
Her painted sculpture bases take the shape of a traditional tiered wedding cake. This references the symbol of the “woman as dessert”, which according to the academic Caitlin Hines (cited in Bucholtz, A, Liang, C & Sutton, L 146:1999) “reduces woman to the status of objects, with the attendant implication of powerlessness, inanimacy, and procurability”. The sculpture bases furthermore allude to the notion that woman are often portrayed as one- dimensional objects to be consumed, and continue to be deemed sexualised commodities objectified by the media for male consumption.
Van Wyk’s bronze sculptures evoke transgressive cake toppers, commenting on social issues such as fertility, the #Zumamustfall campaign, social-political passivity, entrenched patriarchy, birth and memory. She uses the familiar as a starting point to create unsettling and fantastical objects which reflect gender complexity. Through her artworks van Wyk aims to disrupt normative white middle class hereto-femininity and break away from limiting historically-defined conceptions of female identity.
Following a residency at The Falconer Foundry in Kwa-Zulu Natal, Van Wyk was selected and funded by the Eduardo Villa Trust to participate in the El Ranchito at Matadero Madrid. She continued making bronze sculptures at Capa EsCultura Foundry in Madrid. Archival Sky features new bronze works made at the two residencies and includes paintings, fabric sculpture and a short film.
Bucholtz, A, Liang, C & Sutton, L (eds). 1999. The Gendered Self in Discourse. Berkeley: University of California.
The Coded Cloud
Fried Contemporary | 2 March – 1 April 2017
The Coded Cloud features abstract sculptures and paintings by Sophia van Wyk. Van Wyk creates a visual memory bank with cloud shapes coded as timestamps for both significant historical and contemporary social issues including personal dates, events and memories. Van Wyk captures shapes of moving clouds through photographs and sketches and assigns each shape with a code that relates to the time, memory and/or event, then archives it through her art.
She ‘modifies’ the memory or event through interpreting the form or incorporating it with other “memory” clouds. With her sculptures and paintings she is able to change subjectively positive, neutral and negative memories and events through her interpretation, interaction and merging of ‘memory clouds’ to create new stories and memories. Through her artworks
she creates subversive and non- representational biomorphic forms that becomes a metaphor for ‘new meaning and knowledge’ through the unfamiliar.
The use of biomorphic forms, clouds in particular, hold multiple meanings for van Wyk. Because clouds are constantly changing, never static, she sees them as signifying the constant changes in her constructed female identity. Van Wyk specifically work from liminal, morphing and moving forms that refer to an evolving state of flux and change. Ironically the shapes that she creates are solid and static.
Van Wyk positions herself as a post- feminist artist, who wants to activate and engage society by transforming the social landscape and recognising the diversity within gender norms. She challenges notions of gender stereotyping by choosing to undertake both historically construed ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ work.
Flux
Hazard Gallery | 12 November – 10 January 2016
Flux exhibition at Hazard Gallery from 5 November 2015 to 10 January 2016, features selected works from Sophia van Wyk’s Ontluikende on/ge-mak sculpture series together with a collection of paintings.
Van Wyk incorporates biomorphic forms in her artworks to explore the construction of her emergent cultural and gendered identity. Her cultural identity stems from historically defined conceptions of Afrikaner cultural and female gendered identity under apartheid. She approaches identity as having being influenced by personal and collective histories, yet simultaneously being in a constant state of flux.
In the Ontluikende on/ge-mak sculpture series van Wyk incorporates second-hand furniture with biomorphic forms. Tension and disruption is created between the interaction of the form and the domestic objects. The biomorphic form may be read as mauling the furniture in a ‘dangerous’ way, which leads to the destruction of the furniture piece as an ‘object of comfort’. Through these artworks she question her role as an emergent female Afrikaner in post-apartheid South Africa.
Van Wyk’s conflicting relationship between feelings of comfort and discomfort stem firstly from grappling with her Afrikaner legacy and her longing to construct an emergent ‘South African’ identity that stands apart from this limiting inheritance. Secondly, from her position as a post-feminist grappling with breaking away from the limiting Afrikaner female volksmoeder stereotype, by employing both masculine and feminine work techniques whilst embracing feminine complexity at the same time.
While her Ontluikende on/ge-mak sculpture series are influenced by memories from childhood to marriage. Van Wyk’s paintings focus on her new role as mother and the lies and myths surrounding giving birth. In her paintings she incorporates biomorphic forms and employ strategies of chance.
Sophia Van Wyk (born 1981 in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa) obtained her Bachelor of Art in Fine Art degree at the University of Stellenbosch, in 2003. She graduated from her Masters in Fine Art (Cum Laude) from the University of Johannesburg at the beginning of 2015.
Van Wyk has participated in a number of group exhibitions and earlier this year she had her first solo exhibition at the FADA Gallery in Johannesburg. Two of her sculptures were selected as regional finalists for the 2015 Barclays L’Atelier competition. Van Wyk works from her studio in Pretoria.
Emerging dis/comfort | Ontluikende on/ge-mak
FADA Gallery | 8 January – 6 February 2015
In my solo exhibition Ontluikende on/ge-mak I explore the emergent nature of my Afrikaner female identity and the ongoing changes in conceptions of my identity. In my series of sculptures I incorporate second-hand furniture with biomorphic forms. Tension and disruption is created between the interaction of the form and the domestic objects.
The biomorphic form may be read as mauling the furniture in a ‘dangerous’ way, which leads to the destruction of the furniture piece as an ‘object of comfort’. Through these artworks I question my role as an emergent female Afrikaner in post-apartheid South Africa.
My conflicting relationship between feelings of comfort and discomfort stem firstly from grappling with my Afrikaner legacy and my longing to construct an emergent ‘South African’ identity that stands apart from this limiting inheritance. Secondly, from my position as a post-feminist grappling with breaking away from the limiting Afrikaner female volksmoeder stereotype, by employing both masculine and feminine work techniques whilst embracing feminine complexity at the same time.