Although I have worked in a number of media, my basic sensibility is sculptural. Because of this I tend to use colour and material together. Colour is not a separated quality but is bound up with the specifics of the material---the earthly red of the balls of ibomvu clay sold by traditional healers, the blue of stamp pad ink, the yellow of the piles of sulphur spilt on Duraban's Maydon Wharf, the milky green of the Star Café windows...
- Jeremy Wafer, 2002
 

Jeremy Wafer was born in Durban, South Africa, in 1953. As biographer Lola Frost notes, "Growing up on a farm in Kwa-Zulu Natal in the 1960s exposed Wafer to the materiality of objects and, as a consequence of this, to the metaphoric power of materials." Wafer's sensitivity to organic forms is evident in his sculptures and in his most recent work, which explores ideas of land, borders and territory using site-specific work, aerial photography and mapping references.

Wafer earned his undergraduate degree in fine arts from the University of Natal Pietermaritzburg in 1979 and a master's degree in fine arts from the University of Witwatersrand in 1987. He headed the Department of Fine Arts at the Natal Technikon and now lives in Johannesburg, where he is head of the Department of Fine Art at the Witwatersrand Technikon.



  William Kentridge Zwelethu Mthethwa