Chris Soal. To Sharper Our Senses and Soften Our Touch

Soal’s studio-based work is sculptural in its output, working with objects and materials in ways that show a conceptual engagement with the contexts and histories of the objects but that also re-enforce the body as a site for knowledge reception and production. Soal’s works seek to make a poetic statement through the simplest of means, engaging the viewer’s spatial awareness and perceptual habits while challenging core societal preconceptions of value and hierarchy. Through his use of discarded and mundane ephemera, such as toothpicks and bottle caps, along with concrete, rebar, electric fencing cable, sandpaper, and other industrial materials, the artist intuitively develops the familiar to the point of the uncanny. Soal’s works can be considered social abstractions influenced by a reinterpreted Arte Povera that is deeply rooted in and reflective of his upbringing in Johannesburg, South Africa. Working symbiotically with his materials, Soal utilises the inherent physical characteristics of the objects to transform them through processes of aggregation, combination, and erosion. He seeks to interrogate views of nature and culture as a binary concept, foregrounding pressing ecological concerns by repositioning the viewer as an active agent within the contemporary environment. Despite the artificiality of his materials, Soal’s process allows them to take on biomorphic qualities or evoke natural phenomena, expressing his interest in their phenomenological quality.