Jonah Sack

Lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa

Artist statement

My work is about lines – on paper, on our bodies, on the land – with a particular focus on the landscape and history of Southern Africa. I work across a range of forms and mediums, including maps and diagrams, comics and animation, painting and sculpture. But all of my work is a kind of drawing, which is a process of making and revealing marks. Any mark is only visible against a particular surface or background. So my work is concerned with the relationship between an enduring environment and a more or less transient intervention into that environment. Whether we walk across a field or we sink a mineshaft into that field, our action is a gesture that marks the world. And of course the world leaves its marks on us in return. My work explores this network of marks and counter-marks, to form an incomplete archive of fugitive traces.

Artwork