Fences: Study 6

For the past 12 years, Mark has been looking intently at something that most of us try to ignore. Corrugated iron. (The word comes from the Latin ‘Ruga’ meaning to wrinkle or crease). To the conventional eye, this is a poor man’s shelter to be used only in the absence of alternatives, a reminder of global inequality. Yet almost 2 centuries after its invention, it remains indispensable. To Mark, it is all of that but it is also endlessly complex and gloriously tarnished; something that time alone can create and no artist can hope to better. Burnt by the sun, flayed by wind and rain, each sheet is the result of thousands of happy and unhappy accidents - the perfect, imperfect material. His love affair with corrugated iron began in Madagascar, where he learned how to sew in metal and started producing rustic picture frames.
Now he seeks out and buys discarded sheets from Khayelitsha and neighbouring towns. Out of 100 sheets perhaps only 10 are suitable. And all are unpredictable. Mark says: “I don’t look for certain colours - I find them. I don’t choose certain surfaces - they are simply there. I am at the mercy of time and the elements and I know better than to try to compete with either. The more I study corrugated iron, the more I realise that the metal itself should dictate the composition of each artwork.”
At his studio in Woodstock, corrugated iron is the canvas. Time is the artist. If the medium is the art, what then is the role of the artist? The big artistic leap is so simple it seems like no leap at all, even if it is unique. “I bang it flat” says Mark, matter-of-factly. “Once you’ve taken out the corrugations and retuned it to its original state, it becomes manageable. It becomes an endlessly different, gloriously imperfect canvas”. It is precisely this unpredictability that keeps the artist’s eye enthralled and the viewers’ eye transfixed.