Napkin rings, egg cups, fruit and cake platters, candlestick holders, and an epergne, all elaborately crafted out of wire and found in a storage cupboard of the Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg, near Durban, were among the objects come upon by white sculptor Walter Oltmann in 1994. Oltmann was traveling across the country uncovering the history of wirework in South Africa. Originally emanating from a mission station in Lesotho, the domestic objects in the Natal Museum spoke of an intersection of European colonial domestic requirements with African traditions.
In a paper published in the South African art historians’ journal De Arte (September 1997) Oltmann notes that African decorative objects like metal beads and bangles crafted from hand-drawn wire have been dated back to the first millennium AD. Over the last ten years Oltmann has drawn on this dual history of African craft and European influence in his art practice and expanded it in extraordinary ways to make a series of very large pieces that combine the hardness and immutability of utilitarian metal objects with the kind of skilled and intricate techniques and workmanship more usually associated with fine jewelry making.
After Oltmann saw the carved detail on a Benin salt cellar in the British Museum collection of an early European explorer wearing what the artist describes as a “pumped-up, conquistador-like garment, giving the figure an air of masculine power and authority,” he was inspired to make a series of life-size, empty wire suits bristling with insectlike antenna and extensions. Says Oltmann, “For me the imaging of the European explorer by the African ivory carver represents a kind of ironic inversion of the depiction of the exotic ‘other.’ Here the gaze is reverted back onto the European as something foreign and alien. “
Europeans represented the “other” to indigenous Africans—but insects represent the ultimate “other” to all human beings. Universally, people tend to fear cockroaches, crickets, and other skittering invertebrates hiding in dark corners who feed on our food and our possessions.
Working without an assistant and using the very basic tools of wire cutters and pliers, Oltmann does all the weaving and constructing of his large-scale sculptures on his own, developing and refining his initial concepts as he works. Says Oltmann, “The funneling of accumulated time is so clearly carried on the surface of each work. I also like to think of this aspect of slow accretion as linking conceptually to the processes of transformation and becoming—metamorphosis and hatching—as evidenced in insect life.” Each of Oltmann’s insect-themed works takes several months to complete.
The themes of the reexamination of the “other,” the inversion of power and the slow metamorphosis into a new hybrid, European-African identity make Oltmann’s beautiful, and startling, sculptures particularly pertinent in the context of a country struggling to achieve transformation.
Caterpillar Suit 2007
Gold-anodized aluminum wire
118 x 50 x 50 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: John Hodgkiss
© Walter Oltmann
Silverfish 1998
Aluminum and steel wire
300 x 200 x 30 cm
Image courtesy of the artist
Photographer: Natasha Christopher
Collection: Johannesburg Art Gallery
© Walter Oltmann
Armour II 2008
Aluminum and razor wire, and stones
116 x 154 x 50 cm
Photographer: Michael Hall
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Walter Oltmann
Larva Suit I 2001
Aluminum and steel wire
230 x 160 x 40 cm
Photographer: Bob Cnoops
Image courtesy of the artist
Collection: Nelson Mandela Metropolitan
Art Museum, Port Elizabeth, South Africa
© Walter Oltmann