RESERVOIR
01.12 - 17.01.2025

The first time I encountered Dale Lawrence was in the form of a bowl of Lays lightly salted at SMITH in 2019. I was very taken by this image. The solemn bowl of chips formed part of a larger installation called Tragedy of the Rainbow Warriors (after Jannis Kounellis and Francois Pienaar), the centrepiece of his ‘Further Prototypes’. The show dovetailed Christian iconography with a series of domestic installations in a way that made a lot of sense to me. It was as if the bowl was being offered like communion wafers for the Saturday afternoon sacrament.

Tragedy of the Rainbow Warriors has stuck with me and remains one of the most poignant depictions of rugby I’ve come across. There was an unusual eloquence about ‘Further Prototypes’ domestic scenes that brought out ancient truths in ordinary objects. The exhibition served as a reminder that Grace is all around, even in the flatness of white suburban experience. It isn’t hidden elsewhere, out of reach; it is right here and now. The challenge is to accept this.

Since then, Lawrence’s interest in bourgeois normality has deepened but also changed. Where ‘Further Prototypes’ seemed to be reflecting on his cultural upbringing, his latest show at Reservoir, ‘Over the outwash plain’, finds Lawrence after he has shifted the oedipal needle. He’s had a kid (who features prominently in the show), moved to the deep south and got stuck in. As a result, his gaze has lifted from his own navel to the landscape surrounding him.

For one thing, he started noticing a peculiar rock formation on Ou Kaapse Weg, just around the corner from where he lives and works, that marks a transition from the Graafwater Formation to Table Mountain sandstone. Lawrence explains that the change in the rockface is evidence of the inland sea that once covered the Karoo, but also notes that this observation is only possible because of the pass that cuts into the mountain, exposing a cross section. It is this coincidence of industry and stone that served as inspiration for his Roadcut series.

The Roadcut works consist of packaging tape in different shades, layered in order to resemble sheets of sedimentary rock. As far as I know, this is a relatively new direction for Lawrence and it’s one of his more successful experiments to date. The four pieces in this style are able to replicate the gradient of rock strata, while also remaining distinctly plastic. I enjoy the dense chewiness of the roadcuts. There’s something kinda gross about the way they’ve been sliced. They feel at once ancient and contemporary, like so many of Lawrence’s artworks. 

Somewhere Over the Atlantic, a lone large-scale linocut, feels like an outlier, but I appreciate its inclusion. Ash from a Kalk Bay fire is repurposed as ink to depict a satellite render of a storm approaching Cape Town, which was meant to hit on the day the artist’s child was born. It is the only work that gestures towards something outside of Lawrence’s purview; a looming threat to the stability of his world. In a show dominated by robust three-dimensional shapes, Somewhere Over the Atlantic feels comparatively slight. It represents a chink in the armour, reminding us that even the most hermetically sealed existence depends on what it excludes.

Lawrence’s text work remains a bit of a mystery to me. ‘Over the outwash plain’ shines when the artist is at his most tactile; when he’s dealing with matters of density and the tension between thick and thin. The text pieces are similar in form: words are packed into tight paragraphs on epoxied slabs of paper, but their meaning is dispersed. Sourced from spam emails, Reddit threads and the ecological writings of Aldo Leopold, to name but a few, the sentences drift in different directions, free from their significance. I appreciate the way he empties language of its substance, making it almost ornamental, but something about the materiality of text doesn’t harmonise with the rest of the exhibition. Maybe I just prefer the muteness of his other work.

That being said, Lawrence’s way of staging different kinds of information is always intriguing and I wouldn’t want a show of his to be harmonious in any case. ‘Over the outwash plain’ is a collection of records that have been inscribed on different substrates and the artist seems to enjoy orchestrating unlikely coincidences between them. The suite that best exemplifies this impulse is the four slabs of cow fat and veldfire ash, each paired with a sound piece tacked onto the back. Fat is a great medium, because one immediately empathises with its corporeality, whereas sound keeps its distance. This is especially true of the four field recordings Lawrence presents here, which have been washed out using noise compression software. Once again, the artist is manipulating his materials to “both embody and obscure meaning.” 

The recordings offer a cross section of Lawrence’s lifestyle: dinner with friends at a steakhouse, his kid singing in the bath and rain falling on Woolley’s Tidal Pool, while the last piece returns us to his childhood garden, in which the artist, as a toddler, is playing with his brother and a dog. Where ‘Further Prototypes’ dealt with household objects as signifiers, ’Over the outwash plain’ focuses on particular encounters in and near the household. In contrast to the placelessness of Lawrence’s previous work, this exhibition is set in a circumscribed corner of the peninsula. It feels firmly rooted, most probably as a matter of necessity, given where the artist is at, but what he sacrifices in terms of scope is made up for in attentiveness.