Can you briefly introduce yourself and talk about something you’re currently working on?
My name is Dale Lawrence; I'm an artist based in Cape Town. I work in a variety of media including text, paper, tape, fat, epoxy and ash, furniture, video and sound.
I’m currently working on a new series of text works. I’ve been collecting news articles and documents from archives (articles, interviews, memoirs, novels) and processing them using Python scripts that I've developed. Those scripts might do things like search the text for common phrases or rearrange sentences alphabetically so that they no longer read as narrative. I can pick out clippings that appeal to me, decontextualize them, and rearrange those into works that sometimes read like lists and sometimes like fragmented poetry.
Dale Lawrence, Truth over facts, 2024
Your practice involves using non-conventional materials—ashes mixed with locally sourced animal fat, for example. How have your material choices evolved over time? What is the deeper significance behind these particular substances?
I’m interested in the potential of material to carry meaning—not meaning in the way human language carries meaning, but non-verbal meaning like context and memory. There’s a potency to materials when they’re drawn into new contexts that helps make obvious things that have become invisible through familiarity. To me, working in traditional art media would cut out a whole dimension of expression in artistic production.
Over time, I’ve become more confident in experimenting. There was a phase in my career when each piece was a new experience. I’ve become more interested in revisiting and sticking with material a little bit longer. I find myself being drawn to deepening my understanding of certain materials that I keep going back to.
Some materials had quite direct meaning when I first started working with them, but their meaning to me has become more complicated and complex as I’ve continued to work with them. An example might be the cow fat works that I started working on in 2019. I’ve been collecting ash from mountain fires and working that into the pieces. Most recently, I’ve been developing a new series of sound pieces using audio recordings I made. It’s a continuation of the pieces I made and presented in Cape Town in 2024 titled Over the outwash plain, where distributed mode loudspeaker (DML) components were attached to slabs of cow fat and ash, creating sound by reverberating sound waves through the material so the sound originates in the fat itself.
Dale Lawrence, To bear witness to life (210912), 2021
Your artwork doesn’t rely on colours whatsoever. Your work is characterised by a restrained palette—black, white, and shades of brown. There's a clear absence of vibrant colours. This visual language is also present in your former videos, which are entirely black and white. Why have you chosen to exclude colour from your practice at first? Why did you eventually decide to change and add colours to your artwork?
I work with intrinsic colour, meaning that the inherent colour of the materials or footage (or lack thereof) is important. I think this is because of an interest in essences; to me, any addition of colour must be part of the communication, and I think by simplifying the palette, I can make it clearer where the meaningful gestures lie. So the whiteness of the paper and blackness of the ink led my earlier work to rely on these colours. It might also be influenced by me being colourblind, which means as a child I often mixed up colours, especially green and brown, which likely led to an increased reliance on tonality.
Colours started creeping in through things like the tape, which is colourless until it's layered. As my material palette has broadened, colour has started to be a carrier of meaning, such as in my video work, most notably in Between Lives (2023), where I slowly layered more and more video clips on top of each other until the amplified colour became dizzying and mesmerising.
Speaking of your videos, which document your creative process, do you view these films as documentaries or rather as a form of artistic staging that complements the final work? In other words, are they meant to guide or support the viewer’s experience of the artwork?
I started making videos during lockdown, when access to materials was severely limited. I found myself online and in video calls a lot of the time. I started making videos and recording myself in the studio, being influenced by this context. As I was able to leave again, I took that process outside. I started filming excursions, the outside world, and things I found on walks. That continued also when I was in New York and Philadelphia, spending time on residency there. It turned into archives of short clips that I’d filmed on my mobile phone as well as with my computer camera. It wasn't something I had a clear plan for before, but I started processing these videos. I’d take the footage and start looking for patterns or opportunities to play with
things that stand out. Editing became a playful process and a place to experiment. In that sense it is both a documentary and artwork itself, as I hope much of my other work is also. There are many autobiographical aspects to my work, though they may not always be obvious. Fundamentally, I think it feeds into a desire I have to reduce the space between art and life to a minimum.
What role does the spectator play in your work? What kind of posture or attitude should the audience adopt when engaging with your art? And to use a term you once employed, how should we consume* your art?
I think of the artworks as a way to communicate with people, but not in a determined way, as I might do verbally. Art is a way, at least for me, to explore and discover things in the world in ways that I cannot do logically. Art speaks in vague ways and ways that can be felt but not fully
understood. Feelings can be empowering to this understanding. It also helps me to view the world in different ways and to accept the validity of such ways of looking, thinking, and communicating. In the same way, the sound of the river can have meaning. It can be felt, but the significance of that meaning can hardly be expressed through words, but it can be understood.
With regards to the effect on the viewer, I think I don’t fully understand the work that I make. I’m drawn to things without always knowing why, so I stay with them a while or keep coming back to them. As I do, layers of meaning unfold. I hope people viewing my work will be able to engage with it in the same way I do.
*quote from a text linked to the exhibition Another Helping : "Everyone knows how to eat. The effect of eating is equally clear and understood. There may be a subtle effect that is being missed—understood by some and not others—but with art we are often not sure how to consume nor process it. Perhaps this is why we talk about art so much.”
Dale Lawrence, Nameless and Friendless, 2019
You've often described the kind of artist you want to be; an amateur. You once wrote: "I shall collect under the name of amateurism, literally, an activity that is fueled by care and affection rather than by profit and selfish, narrow specialization." Through your writing and interviews, you've drawn a portrait of the “amateur”—someone who does what they do out of love. Would you say you’ve succeeded in becoming that kind of artist? And if so, how does this approach influence your creative process?
I hope I have. As you said, an amateur is somebody who does something out of love and who does what they do out of choice when they could potentially be doing something else. What is essential to me is that it is also someone for whom the activity is embedded into their life at large. They might be engaged in making art, but that fits within a bigger life-world. Despite this strong sense of love and choice, we can say that amateurs often do things that they’re not necessarily the best at. I think therein lies a sense of bravery, which is something I admire and that imbues the work with a sort of vitality. I’ve tried to retain that willingness to experiment, to make mistakes, and to value the process as much as the result. It fits into an understanding of art in service of life, not the other way around. It’s like going for a walk. It’s something you do at the end of the day, out of love. You’re might not be entirely sure where you're going to go; you might walk a new path, or you might walk a familiar path. It’s free from the designs of ambition.
You've also reflected on the tension between novelty and repetition in the art world. You said: "I am playing off the two driving contradictory mechanisms within the art industry—the fact that on one hand you’re supposed to do new things because new things communicate new ideas—which is the point of contemporary art—and on the other, you’re supposed to do more of the same because it needs to be sustainable economically." How do you personally deal with that contradiction? How do you approach the idea of novelty—both in relation to other artists and within your own evolving body of work?
I think I used to react a lot to the repetition I saw as industry pressure. I also think that was definitely when I was younger. As I’ve matured, I’ve gained an appreciation for retracing your steps. I no longer see it purely as industry pressure, possibly because I’m more familiar with the industry and less interested in its pressure. I think this tension is not specific to the art industry, and not even to the economy at large; it’s internalised, it’s cultural. I find myself torn between wanting to explore new things, while being drawn more and more to walk those same paths, to deepen my understanding, my experience with things. There can be newness in revisitation.
I think what I find most important is to stay engaged with whatever path feels natural and vital. In the same way, if I feel like I always need to do something new, this can be a way of avoiding deeper understanding. Because of my tendency to move on from one material to another, my career has seen some big chapters. In that open-endedness that I’ve want to keep. I want to be willing to explore new avenues, but I also find that I’ve also left some things that I’ve cared a lot about quite unfinished.
Typography plays a role in your work. Interestingly, you rarely manipulate typefaces for aesthetic purposes. Instead, your use of words feels direct, emphasising meaning over form. That said, text in your work never stands alone; it always coexists with the visual. How do you understand the relationship between writing and visual art in your practice?
My approach to typography is similar to my approach to colour. I want to emphasise the material qualities of writing and language. Spending too much time on typesetting possibly feels like it distracts from the essential nature of it. The editing process is different from writing logical or verbal speech, as it can be harsh and often mechanical. I think also that the nakedness of with which the sentences are presented leaves room for them to create or suggest multiple connections. They aren't foreclosed into rigid meaning. People’s imaginations will try to make sense out of them, allowing the words to become much bigger than they are alone.
In your work, there’s a clear parallel between the natural world and the digital realm. The latter often merges with the former—such as in your video projection installations—almost as if the digital is being used to construct a kind of natural landscape. What connection do you see between these two worlds, and how does this relationship shape or define your artistic practice?
Such great parts of our lives exist online that I think it would be silly to take a dismissive approach. Similarly, it would be naive to be uncritical. I'm interested in looking at human technologies and digital technologies as part of the overarching natural development of humanity. I try to experience human technologies not as opposed to the natural world but as something that has arisen from it. Human technology evolved naturally in the world, and in that we bring all of our human, animal, biological, and spiritual needs to the digital sphere. I'm interested in exploring ways in which the boundaries between those become fuzzy. These worlds sometimes overlap to such a degree that I think it's important to not lose our connection to history, to life, and to the world at large, including nature, or to lose perspective when it comes to the particularity of the present and its minuteness with regards to human history at large. It’s important for me not to present these worlds as competing entities but rather as facets of life that overlap and sometimes contend.
In Over the Outwash Plain, you bring together geological history, personal memory, and digital media through unconventional materials. By incorporating footage from your childhood, you create a deeply personal framework—yet one that also seeks to resonate with the viewer. How do you approach the balance between making work that is intimately personal and universally relatable?
I think this is something that I've spent a fair amount of time trying to grapple with, trying to figure out how to address the enormity of the present with the limitedness of a single person and a single life. I think where I've arrived, for the moment, is to recognise the significance in the granular, in the tiny, in the immediate moments, and in contemporary life in relation to the multitude of crises and circumstances of the modern humanity we find ourselves in. The best way that I can think to do it is to be deeply sensitive to the immediate and present.
By focusing on the personal and perhaps the tension between the personal and universal, there's potential for finding common understanding. Trying to deal with subjects that are too big head-on presents the risk of getting into abstractions that feel removed and distant. Addressing things in a small way, bit by bit, seems to be a better way to connect to each other, to relate to things at large, and to prevent feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of things.
