Erections

Erections is a depiction of the Lowveld landscape and its textures. Being a sculptor first, Nkosinathi's foraging for found objects over the years has left him with the taste, touch and feel of their textures and the earth where they are from. These, over the years, have found themselves depicted on canvas through emotions and feelings, thereby evidently showing the depth of the artist's relationship with his materials.

Erections looks at the 'sLowveld' life with its tentative situations on race, culture and traditions that the artist has lived through,in comparison with the buxom urban jozi culture.As much as the Lowveld has its own slow pace of life, its natural beauty has always fascinated Nkosinathi and it is his go to space for recharging, reprogramming and releasing. This is his first ever piece of many that he has experienced with rough hessian material with. He has depicted his home province of Mpumalanga with loose informal architecture lines like scratched on the earthly ground. He is somehow intermittently marking the land in silent conversations on what has been subtracted, what has been left, seeking what could still be there and leaving a bearance on what has left a mark behind..

But the main question is why the conversations and debates on hessian fabric?

Nkosinathi, between a tear and a wide smile, lies a rather sad but victorious relationship with hessian material. Having had a harrowing experience with his previous representation by a well-known art gallery in joburg when all that was owed him was embezzled, the artist fell from riches to rags, losing a lot in his life and reduced to a pauper. Returning from Cape Town with nothing but his family and a two month old daughter, the family was homeless and owned nothing to their name. Having found a  temporary place to live in an old church building, the journey to recovery was not an easy one. A few blankets and hessian fabrics became the cover from the cold nights. The smell and rough comfort of the hessian material had become the bitter aroma of the entire room. Gradually, as creativity returned to the artist, he started to experiment with the tricky hessian material which absorbed more paint than the usual canvas and fabriano paper materials.

His first creation, Erections was a dialogue with where he was from, where he was and a faith of where he will be God willing. The result was a piece of mixed emotions that he was so proud of and it's workmanship that he framed it in an expensive 'museum-glass'.

Nkosinathi says about every work on hessian, " Hessian material has carried me like a disabled, down trodden artist in my low days. For me to execute a great piece of art on hessian material is a sweet victory, of having defeated what used to cover me with its own power."