Sifiso Mkhabela
Sifiso Mkhabela was born in Mbombela in 1991 before moving to Pretoria to pursue
his art career in 2013 by completing his B-Tech degree in Fine and Applied Arts.
After graduating he went on and worked for Angus Taylor where he was a studio
assistant.
Picking up the welder and the grinder was not just an artistic choice for him, it is a
passion he connected with as a youngster that was fuelled by his father. His
profession as a boiler maker exposed the young Mkhabela to metal working, which
he quickly mastered."I draw my inspiration from my childhood memories," he says. "Working with metal
is hard work and watching my father work tirelessly over the years and never giving
up really helped me form the solid ground that I stand on as a sculptor today. Metal
is a medium that speaks volumes to me because it is used in almost everything we
used in our daily lives, metal is the back bone of our entire infrastructure."
Mkhabela is currently working with geometric forms and organic structures to
create his sculptures. He employs hybrid techniques in his work as a powerful tool
to transform and reconstruct existing concepts to create new exciting structures.
"My point of view is inspired by mathematical and scientific concepts. In particular,
Platonism is a contemporary view that there are abstract objects that do not exist in
time or space. My work is an attempt to represent these abstract objects taking
from my childhood experience. My works becomes hybrids of these abstract objects
as they are after all just mere representations of the originals."
To begin his process, his sculptures are made out of shoe sole rubber and
sometimes wire that are later turned into life-sized, and sometimes thee times life-
sized sculptures. The surface of his sculptures often have a raw translucent quality
that do not mask the medium but rather embraces the texture it introduces into his
sculptures.
"The more I work with this medium the more I find new ways of manipulating it to
depict my thoughts of the abstract objects that Plato is talking about in his theory. I
call them hybrids of my thoughts," he says.
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