In 2005 a series of power blackouts swept across the city and suburbs of Johannesburg. Mary Wafer had just moved into an eighth-floor apartment in Braamfontein from where she had a spectacular view across an often dark and silent city. This extraordinary sight - of a city that should be brightly illuminated laid out in almost total darkness - generated a deep anxiety about the unpredictability not only of the blackouts, but of things in general. It suggested to Wafer our inability to predict anything with confidence, to be sure of what might happen next. This experience filtered into her painting in the form of building interiors imbued with a sense of the sinister. She sought to convey a sense of the unsettling feeling one has over something that has not yet happened, to suggest the threat of something that is always imminent, never arrived at or concluded.
The paintings represent - as far as 'representation' is possible in her intensely dark palette - the interiors of apartment block basements, the ceilings of parking garages with their tracks and corridors of lights and plumbing, and their deep corners and sharp turns. Wafer has sought to convey the mundane functionality of such spaces as well as their ability to generate shadows, even though they seem to be in perpetual twilight. Her works gesture at spaces - actual, psychological - that are only temporarily occupied, traversed only as a matter of pure contingency. Such spaces are intensely familiar - we visit them daily, but their purpose is always to convey us somewhere else. They are thoroughfares, holding zones, liminal spaces that we enter only in order to leave them. They generate an anxiety that is allied to the desire to move through, to arrive somewhere other than here.
Wafer's new prints and paintings crystallise many of the interests evident in earlier works that draw on images related to the architecture of movement and transport. In these, her references to alienating peripheral structures, such as highways, bridges and highway underpasses, suggest exclusion and marginality in relation to space. The new works extend and intensify these concerns, making their sense of unease more provocatively interior.
Mary Wafer grew up in Durban. After three years of study at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, she relocated to Johannesburg and completed her Advanced Diploma in Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2003, Wafer travelled to London and Copenhagen, but returned to South Africa in 2005 to pursue a Master's in Fine Art.
In 2005 Wafer worked at David Krut Print Workshop (DKW) on several monotypes and the etching Berea Road. She returned to DKW's new printing premises at Arts on Main in early 2011 to complete a series of intaglio prints with printers Jillian Ross and Mlungisi Kongisa. In April she completed 20 monotype prints at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York with the American master printer Phil Sanders. This is Wafer's first exhibition at David Krut Projects, Johannesburg and Cape Town.
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