Sculpting success
WESTDENE - Artist and recent finalist at the PPC Imaginarium awards Deon de Lange speaks about his work and the process of preparing for the awards.
Artist Deon de Lange was impressed with the creative journey he took leading up to the final exhibition of the PPC Imaginarium Awards.
De Lange has been active in the ceramics industry for more than 30 years and is also a professional photographer.
“Ceramics has always been a great passion of mine. From there I started to do more craft pieces than main stream commercial pieces,” said de Lange.
“With electronic media, I find that people in general print less and less. So that’s gradually also becoming obsolete unless it’s refined art,” said de Lange.
The pieces created by de Lange were inspired by archaeological excavations with reference to ancient Greece.
Individual beads were cast in both concrete and resin, taking from other architectural elements and other artefacts.
“It was a wonderful process of doing research in how I could formulate the right cement and concrete mixture. This specific mixture would then result in a light weight material that could functionally be used as jewellery.”
De Lange was also very impressed with the amount of support the PPC Awards contestants received from PPC and suppliers.
“The amount of support we’ve been receiving from PPC has been amazing . They have made it so easy for us to access the needed suppliers for our projects. Because it’s the immeasurable publicity that the company gets from associating with our products and projects.”
After exhibiting at the PPC Imaginarium Awards de Lange plans on exhibiting his work in New York at the end of January.
In February, de Lange will be exhibiting his work at the Design Indaba in Cape Town.
“I really think these events will be the start of spreading the artwork into a wider market,” he said.
