SPOOR XIX Terracotta
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With the Spoor series, Dylan Lewis hones in on the textural quality of his sculptures while eschewing their figurative components. The result is a series of wall-mounted relief works that leap between the realms of painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Dylan’s other works involve careful navigation between several steps before completion. The Spoor works allow for immediate, intuitive interaction with the clay panels. Bypassing intentionality, the Spoor works are a vessel for raw, unfiltered emotion and a testament to corporeal experience.
Without any explicit subject matter, the panels tend towards abstraction. At the same time though, the imprints that remain of the artist’s actions speak to an element of intense performance and physical action.
Some are ambiguously marked, while others testify to a continuous circular motion of footprints. Some convey violence and turmoil with their deep slashes and feral ‘claw’ marks. Others are powerfully serene and calming. What is key is the element of traces, mark-making as an assertion of presence.
This is where the title of the series becomes significant. In the wild, spoor are traces left behind by animals that indicate their presence and actions in a particular area and can be used for tracking and surveying. These include distinctive animal tracks, scents, broken foliage, and drag marks. Be- cause these works require Dylan to act spontaneously and interpret later, in a sense they are traces of the artist’s unconscious, his instinctual self.
About the artist
Dylan Lewis is a second-generation South African sculptor. Lewis’s international career spans two decades and includes exhibitions in Paris, Sydney, Toronto, Houston and San Francisco, as well as numerous one-man exhibitions in London, where he is among the few living artists to have held solo auctions at Christie’s.
A central project in the artist practice is the Dylan Lewis Sculpture Garden in Stellenbosch, a seven-hectare landscape that he personally shaped and filled with more than sixty monumental sculptures.
The artist in essence sculpted a flat canvas of land – with every metre of the seven hectare expanse shaped, articulated and moulded, and two excavator operators essentially serving as a de facto extension of Lewis’ own hands during the process.