My name is Lukas Adriaan Jacobus du Plessis - my father made a spelling mistake when registering my names - Jacobus should have been Jakobus being a boereseun and according to tradition, as the second son are given the names of the father of the mother. The reason for dutch names and a french Huguenot surname.
I am an obsessive maker of objects that my soul is guiding me to make. My hands subconsciously translates what is on my mind. I am not an academic art student with a mission to investigate forms or shapes or a very academic or controversial statement or message. I make art because it heals my soul and maybe bring joy to others too. I do have a very analytical mind and have a very strong need to analise the things I do. Here is my story.
As a young boy my family spoke of me as being artistic, to the dismay of my father I would use his handyman materials or any other materials I could find to make relief work and pieces of art. I made drawings on any paper I could find. I build huge rural communities in the garden, farm layouts with farm houses made of mud and bricks, tarred (mud) roads. Planted crops and tended to these farms for long periods. This sometimes took months to complete or when my dog decided he also wants to play with.
I obsessively knitted jerseys for me and my bother when my mother died at the age of 15. My father died 3 years later. Wool to me represent love, caring, “geborgenheid”, affection as my mother knitted all my jumpers when I was a child. I started making these little needle felt figures when the basement sometimes feels distant and cold and is not calling me. I have also included little needle felt figures in some of my sculptures bringing the emotions I relate to the wool into the sculpture. I also have plans to make some needle felt work - masquerade, paper faces on parade…
As a young man in my 30s I started learning pottery and started working in the
studio of Gael Neke (well known South African artist) learning all the techniques
and developed some working methods of my own. She taught me how to look at
and appreciate art by visiting lots of exhibitions and art galleries discussing all the
work on show. Initially I was fascinated by shells and produced a lot of vessels
based on shell shapes, had a few group exhibitions with the studio and the south
african potters association. I then took the brave step to me of moving away from
vessels and started making faces and human figures which lead to my first solo
exhibition in South Africa in the 1980s. A huge step for me to expose my soul. I
was also a finalist in a prestigious art competition in South Africa.
Being an orphan the need to study and make a living meant that I had to study in the evenings while working during the day. This then also facilitated the decision for me to start travelling for business. While this was an enriching experience it meant that I stopped making art for more than 20 years. By then I struggled with my health, had a multiple bypass operation, was in a wheelchair for a period because of undiagnosed back issues and on top of this came to my shock and horror an early retirement in 2018. I became an emotional old man, crying my heart out over everything and nothing and my whole life came back to me making all these feelings very intense and frightening. One of the best things Nestlé did was to pay for me to go through retirement coaching sessions to deal with the retirement which brought me in contact with Louise, an enlightening experience and the digestion could begin, the flow brought me back to clay.
I love the feeling of the clay, the willingness to be formed and shaped following the touch and pressure of your hand, the earthiness of the process, the firing in the kiln allowing the purifying (afrikaans louter) process to having the final say.
Trying to occupy my time and deal with my situation I started making a series of heads, anonymous people - dealing with these emotions hurting my soul. True to my analytic mind I started reading about emotions and learnt about the eight emotions, the subtlety of the words and our incompetence of expressing these emotions. I started painting the sculptures with the emotions words and then fired them in sawdust, literally purifying the emotions in a crucible. The burnt smell that lingers around the sculptures reminds me of Africa and my sculptures of 20 years ago. I then put them away on a shelf and started making other sculptures which calmed me down and helped with the healing process.
I played with “dolosse” (Afrikaans word for animal bones) as a child and started replicating some of these sensual bone shapes from the memories of my soul, but human shapes interest me more.
My partner then bought a set of alphabetic letters for imprinting in the clay. This reminded me of an old Remington typewriter I had as a child and it gave me the freedom to start writing very personal messages on my sculptures, reminiscent of my childhood freedom and no care in the world. Something I have always resisted very strongly. For the first time in my life I could express anger at my mother for dying when I was so young. A life size sculpture emerged. I then looked at the eight emotions sculptures again and realised that they capture and say a lot about the emotional and healing process I went through making them. I have now decided that it is time for them to come out of the basement and I now have made pedestal for them on which I could write the academic words with my manual typewriter related to the emotions creating a coherent presentation about human emotions, hoping that this will be of interest to other people too or maybe allowing them to find insight or a way of healing some of their own emotions. My body of work over the last two years are all very emotional pieces coming directly from my soul. I have to make and in the process I just follow my soul… my hands and conscious mind look after the quality of the work, allowing me to heal and deal with all the emotions of the last 50 years. I am now at a stage where a lot more thought goes into my sculptures to stimulate communication with the viewer.
I am now ready to move all of my work out of the basement and put them on show as I believe it will be of interest to other people and provoke some form of discussion.
