Compound

Jeremy Wafer, Compound, 2014
Wall drawing in pencil and varnish
200 x 350 cm
Courtesy the artist, photograph Andrea Avezzù

This work responds to the memory of dwellings for
farm workers on my family’s farm in South Africa.
These now abandoned buildings bear the traces and
evidence of their former use and occupancy. Their
quiet but insistent presence has provoked a number
of works in sculpture, drawing and photography,
which reflect on themes of possession and
dispossession, of removal and loss, of security and
vulnerability and the ways in which these are played
out on the intimate scale of personal experience and
feeling as much as on the larger stage of the political.

Jeremy Wafer is an artist and professor of fine art at the University
of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He received degrees in
fine arts and history of art from the University of KwaZulu-Natal
(Pietermaritzburg) and the University of the Witwatersrand. His
work engages with the politics and poetics of space and place
and with mapping the social, cultural and political geography
of South Africa. His gallery and site-specific works in sculpture,
photography and drawing have been exhibited in South Africa and
internationally. He is the winner of a number of awards, including
the Sasol Wax Art Award (2007), and he has had fellowships
at the Civitella Ranieri, Italy, the Thami Mnyele Foundation,
Amsterdam, the Ampersand Foundation, New York and with
the South Project in Melbourne in 2005. He has completed
public commissions for the Gugu Dlamini Park, Durban, and the
International Convention Centre, Durban, amongst others. He was
Visiting Artist at Monash University, Melbourne in 2012. His work
is represented in the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, DC, Iziko South African National Gallery,
the Johannesburg Art Gallery and many other museum, private
and corporate collections. A major retrospective show, Survey, was
exhibited at the Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg in 2013, and a
solo show, Strata, at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg in 2014.