Dale Lawrence is a South African artist living and working in Cape Town. His multidisciplinary practice investigates the interplay between language, materiality, and gesture, often by disrupting repetition—whether in the methods of making, the conventions of communication, or the rhythms of everyday life. Through this disruption, Lawrence seeks out moments of intimacy, estrangement, and invention, allowing the familiar to appear suddenly unfamiliar and charged with new meaning.
Working across a range of mediums, such as text, sculpture, print, performance, and installation, Lawrence’s work frequently collapses the distinctions between them. His process often involves a kind of creative destruction or reinterpretation: tearing up unsold works to repurpose them into new ones or reconstructing iconic pieces using various materials.
A significant strand of his practice is dedicated to language. In his text-based works, Lawrence collects and assembles fragments of language drawn from fleeting or overlooked sources: online clickbait headlines, news articles, advertisements, social media feeds, novels, song lyrics, political speeches, and conversational transcripts. These phrases are distilled and reordered into poetic compositions that oscillate between absurdity, critique, and emotional resonance. Through this act of extraction and rearrangement, language is revealed as both raw material and cultural artifact—simultaneously personal and public, constructed and unstable. The word has a double meaning. It has a linguistic value, but also an aesthetic one, to be placed in perspective with the overall work.
Lawrence’s work questions how meaning is made and remade in a world saturated with repetition, consumption, and noise. At its core, his practice is driven by a deep interest in transformation: of objects, words, ideas, and ultimately of the viewer’s own perception. By engaging with the fragile boundaries between originality and reproduction, presence and absence, and sense and nonsense, Lawrence invites us to consider how we inhabit language and how language, in turn, inhabits us. Dale Lawrence takes a look at himself, through personal compositions, but also at the world, which he questions and criticizes with humor.