Artist Description

Artist Notes:
This work aligns to the competition theme (On the Brink: Visualizing Climate Change), as it is the product of an innovative and earth-focused creative process described above as sand casting, negative imprints are created in sand, clay as a recording tool captures the imprints into positive formations, when fired at high temperatures, these imprints and formations could last up to 30 000 years.

“Carbon generations” is an emblem of innovative artistic studio practice a creative response to the needs of our current natural environment where human activities need to rethought in search of ways by which we may take from nature what we can put back.
This work is also an ongoing visual inquiry demonstrating a curiosity about the face mask (N95 respirator with filter) and how it can be imprinted into the sand and leave a negative form which is later cast into artwork. Having to work in a ceramic studio of dusty clay and sand, I have always used the N95 respirator even before the Covid-19 outbreak, the prototype I used to create “Carbon generations” was purchased while I was doing work in Dakar Senegal February-March 2020, it has served as my entry souvenir into the global health protocols of wearing face masks in public (of cause now I have many more masks which replaced it).
In a thought pattern which unfolded when the Covid-19 pandemic was still relatively new, “Carbon generations” is a work in progress visual emblem of how things like respiration, oxygen and fresh air are now a threat to health, so It seems we are entering a fourth industrial survey of the collective threats to the collective narrative of breathing, right at the mercy of our anthropogenic influence, we find questions of the destructive power of nature and her declining capacities, for the artist this is three parts visualizing the potential future of a dying "post-biotic" natural world, and two parts a manifestation of the psychological imprints of a pandemic atmosphere.

Carbon Generations (triptych)

Sand-Cast Ceramic by Sylvester Zanoxolo Mqeku
Materials used
clay - red iron oxide, chrome oxide and rutile dioxide on sandcast terracotta clay
Size
W:30cm X H:10cm X D:8cm
Year
2021
This is a unique work

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R10 000 
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  • Artist Description
    • Artist Description

      Artist Notes:
      This work aligns to the competition theme (On the Brink: Visualizing Climate Change), as it is the product of an innovative and earth-focused creative process described above as sand casting, negative imprints are created in sand, clay as a recording tool captures the imprints into positive formations, when fired at high temperatures, these imprints and formations could last up to 30 000 years.

      “Carbon generations” is an emblem of innovative artistic studio practice a creative response to the needs of our current natural environment where human activities need to rethought in search of ways by which we may take from nature what we can put back.
      This work is also an ongoing visual inquiry demonstrating a curiosity about the face mask (N95 respirator with filter) and how it can be imprinted into the sand and leave a negative form which is later cast into artwork. Having to work in a ceramic studio of dusty clay and sand, I have always used the N95 respirator even before the Covid-19 outbreak, the prototype I used to create “Carbon generations” was purchased while I was doing work in Dakar Senegal February-March 2020, it has served as my entry souvenir into the global health protocols of wearing face masks in public (of cause now I have many more masks which replaced it).
      In a thought pattern which unfolded when the Covid-19 pandemic was still relatively new, “Carbon generations” is a work in progress visual emblem of how things like respiration, oxygen and fresh air are now a threat to health, so It seems we are entering a fourth industrial survey of the collective threats to the collective narrative of breathing, right at the mercy of our anthropogenic influence, we find questions of the destructive power of nature and her declining capacities, for the artist this is three parts visualizing the potential future of a dying "post-biotic" natural world, and two parts a manifestation of the psychological imprints of a pandemic atmosphere.

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