Description
The print was pressed with old foundational District Six bricks and ink roller. The work is based on topographical interpretations of areas on the cape flats. Hou vir jou plat (keep yourself small/flat) was a saying that people used in an attempt to diminish your efforts to strive. Maroon reflects;
“I always found the saying funny. Like flattening a three dimensional object or space because the ‘aggressor’ can’t cope so we should all be reduced to two dimensional objects. And if 2D is too difficult, do we then accommodate again to become a single line? That was always where my brain went when I heard someone use this line.”
Bio
Warren Maroon (b. 1985, Cape Town) is a conceptual sculptor whose work is deeply rooted in his experience growing up in Mitchell’s Plain on the Cape Flats, an environment shaped by poverty, gangsterism, and systemic violence. For Maroon, art became both a means of survival and a language for transformation, allowing him to reframe hardship into sculptural forms that are at once raw, poetic, and deeply resonant.
Maroon graduated with a Diploma in Fine Art from the Ruth Prowse School of Art in 2011, though it was only in 2018 that he began to fully articulate his artistic voice. His practice aligns with the sensibility of Arte Povera, drawing on found objects—bricks, cardboard, tools, and discarded fragments of the everyday. By reconfiguring these overlooked materials, he creates works that carry histories of resilience, memory, and marginalisation, challenging viewers to see beyond material function to the social and emotional worlds embedded within them.
