Place publication: (Potchefstroom, RSA) Publisher: The artist
Reference note: This book entitled 'Fin.' consists of 14 laser-engraved landscape fragments encased in perspex and stitched together to form transparent pages. This laser technology literary burns and engraves images of the landscape until only fragments of the delicate cotton Fabriano paper remain. These burnt fragments are layered between perspex as if remnants of a historically significant archival document.
Conceptually the book is characterised by a fascination with the landscape as a fragile and malleable construct in the hands of man. The work depicts the landscape as overworked, processed, exhausted, mined and exploited by human activities, a landscape toyed with until its scars assume the nature of traces of human aggression. The process of bruising transforms and mutates the landscape so that it is silenced and the wasteland of destruction remains. As one pages thought the book one moves deeper and deeper into the landscape of destruction until only silence and emptiness are left.
Exhibition notes: Included on the exhibition 'Transgressions and Boundaries of the Page', exhibited at WOORDFEES 2010. Archive Room in JS Gericke Library, University of Stellenbosch, 1st - 6th March 2010; The Gallery of the North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 15th April - 13th May 2010; the FADA Gallery, Faculty of Art Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg, 12th - 30th July 2010.