johann potgieter artist

about

We spend much of our lives being orderly or attempting to achieve order. Tidy your room, brush your teeth, don’t break the law, swim between the flags, save for retirement. These are the obvious forms of order, but there are also those self-imposed, nonsensical forms. Things like, don’t step on cracks in the path, or in my case, rounding up the total price of petrol at the bowser to the nearest dollar (by the way, I don’t do that anymore). In my art practice, I want to instead seek out and explore disorder, or the antithesis of order. Not to be an anarchist, but to explore entropy, to discover the different and most liberated paths to disorder and to breakdown and document the moment that change occurs.

From the perspective of order, one way of undermining order is to do so in an orderly way. For example, a rule that there can be no straight lines would be one step towards disrupting the order of straight lines however, it seems to defeat the purpose and only leaves you with another rule that needs to be undermined (how to disrupt the order of only allowing non-straight lines). This reminds me of the infinity of change that is precisely defined in calculus, or the problem of a computer’s inability to truly generate a random number.1 Approaching disorder in this way would suggest there is still a rules-based order in chaos even if it is extremely hard to identify.

Another apparently random system is the line of a meandering river or contour lines on a slope. It is wind, rain, erosion, volcanoes, earthquakes, etc. that cause these lines. These events have no bias, preference, or interest in the resulting curve of a river or contour. Whilst the qualities of lines created in this way are less self-conscious than a rule-based approach of undermining order, they are still the result of cause and effect.

Given the above two examples or scenarios, I’m not sure if it’s possible to completely escape order and rules, but I’d like to explore this idea further. How to liberate oneself from order? The body of work I produced during my BFA at NAS, in both sculpture and drawing, was the genesis of and an initial response to this line of thought. To date, when thinking about, or making work like this, it sometimes feels like the work makes itself, or that I have a deep but calm knowing while making. The best way I can find to describe this is that it feels similar to my feelings associated with my understanding of the sublime. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way, but because it’s new to me, it feels like a new sublime.

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Johann is a Sydney based multidisciplinary artist, working across sculpture, installation and related spatial art practices including drawing.

EDUCATION

2020 Currently doing Master of Fine Art, National Art School, Sydney

2018 Bachelor Fine Arts, Sculpture Studio, National Art School, Sydney

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2020 Summer Group Exhibition, Martin Browne Contemporary, Paddington, NSW

2019 Lines of Consciousness, aMBUSH Gallery, Waterloo, NSW

2018 Released, BFA Exhibition, National Art School, Sydney, NSW

2018 Open Day Drawing Exhibition, National Art School, Sydney, NSW

2018 Space Invaders, Library Stairwell Gallery, Darlinghurst, NSW

2018 Margaret Olley Drawing Week, National Art School, Sydney, NSW

2018 Foley St Streetware Graffiti Wall, Foley St, Darlinghurst, NSW

2017 Margaret Olley Drawing Week, National Art School, Sydney

2017 The Unofficial Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi

2016 The Unofficial Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi

AWARDS

2018 The Armory, Sydney Olympic Park Residency Award for Sculpture

2017 Mirvac Sculpture Competition

COLLECTIONS

2019 National Art School Collection, Sydney

PUBLICATION REFERENCES

2017 Aqua Bumps www.aquabumps.com...

artwork