IMPLEMENT

Southern Guild

24.05.2019 – 17.07.2019

Implement by Conrad Hicks is a paean to the ancient art of blacksmithing and the role of the human hand in toolmaking. Every piece in this collection of new work by South Africa’s foremost artist-blacksmith has been hand forged from steel, iron or (most unusually for a blacksmith) copper. Conrad eschews mechanised modes of production, using only traditional jointing methods whose structure he believes is crucial to the symbolic meaning of the finished form.

His work is extremely labour-intensive, necessitating a physicality through which he channels his subconscious. In the process of cutting, pressing, heating, hammering and stretching the metal, he discovers an archetypal language that calls to mind ancient art forms. Each piece is unique, its rippled surface carrying a primal energy that speaks of the artist’s labour and intuitive understanding of the metal’s potential. His work is extremely labour-intensive, necessitating a physicality through which he channels his subconscious. In the process of cutting, pressing, heating, hammering and stretching the metal, he discovers an archetypal language that calls to mind ancient art forms. Each piece is unique, its rippled surface carrying a primal energy that speaks of the artist’s labour and intuitive understanding of the metal’s potential.

A self-taught blacksmith, Conrad’s artistic orientation from the outset was towards the practical disciplines. After graduating with a distinction in sculpture from the Cape Technikon in 1986, he worked in boat building and restoration but was drawn to blacksmithing by his interest in doing a craft. In 1991, he opened his forge workshop in Cape Town and spent the next 15 years concentrating on architectural commissions and more utilitarian metalwork. He developed a following for his sculptural approach, which earned him commissions for major installations at several public landmarks and private residences (the latter both locally and abroad). As his output grew, so did his self-expression, with the result that tool and sculpture – function and form – began to converge. For the past 10 years, he has focused almost exclusively on sculpture and one-off collectible pieces.

Conrad’s commitment to materiality is interwoven with a deep mysticism. A student of human evolution and anthropology, he draws a correlation between his process and what drove the earliest tool-makers throughout our ancestors’ history. It is the pursuit of beauty through technology that has driven our evolution as humans. Beauty, as he defines it, is our appreciation of form and function, which has accrued over millennia and is now encoded into our DNA as an intuitive engineering choice.

Unlike other craftsmen, blacksmiths have to make their own tools and Conrad’s cathedral-like forge in The Bijou, an old Art Deco cinema in Observatory, Cape Town, is home to his vast collection of antique and self-made tools. They occupy a place at the heart of his artistic practice and outlook, object lessons in structure and meaning whose shapes and forms he still uses in his sculpture and one-off collectible pieces. They connect him – and us – to our earliest forebears, setting in motion existential changes that became humankind’s evolutionary advantage.

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