Held in partnership with Griffin Art Projects (Vancouver, Canada) and the Kromdraai Impact Hub, this ten-day workshop was created to support professional artists through the sharing of knowledge and technical skills related to an age-old form of sculptural practice, namely, relief work in wood (rather than rock or stone). It formed the second iteration of Carving X, initiated by participating artist Collen Maswanganyi in 2022 with the support of the Claire and Edoardo Villa WIll Trust.

During the workshop, participants were given an opportunity to create new work for exhibition, and to discuss their work with their peers, demonstrating different techniques that they use to work with wood and providing an overview of how these processes relate to their broader conceptual concerns. Some works were created through assemblage and collage, where different pieces are joined to create a multi-textured whole. Most, however, were made by carving back from a single piece of wood. The motivations that underpin their making vary from one artist to the next. In some cases, one finds a desire to preserve and educate audiences of one’s cultural heritage. Here, attention is drawn to oral histories and the place of relief, not as a substitute to the written word, but as its own form of communication; interpreted or understood, to varying degrees, based on one’s proximity or connection to the forms, images or inscriptions depicted. Central is the place of such insignia and the meanings attributed to them in the structure and organisation of life – whether religious, political, spiritual, or social – as well as the role of family and community therein. In other instances, the personal, poetic and fictional merge, foregrounding the various shades of social, economic and political life that animate our everyday.

The workshop concluded with an exhibition in the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture’s Project Space, giving audiences a unique insight into the work of participating artists and the practice of relief-work in wood as a whole.