TIGHT FIVE – Wesley John Fourie
Wesley John Fourie is an emerging artist whose work explores the sensual and the tactile. Their questioning of sexuality, nature, love, and loss, often manifests as large-scale soft sculptures. Textiles have long been a vehicle for storytelling but have recently had something of a renaissance in contemporary art. These thread-based ways of making offer powerful political and emotional associations, in Fourie’s practice they also offer direct relation to land forms through scale and to their creator through an intensity of making.
When did it click?
I had a breakthrough during an artist residency in Nepal when the gallery director asked the height of Aotearoa’s tallest mountain. When I told him Aoraki Mount Cook is 3,724m he said “Oh, not big at all!” and I thought “Umm F you dude, it is a very culturally important mountain!!” I had been knitting for a while and realised that it would be the best technique to create a scale model of the mountain, to show how big it was. The act of knitting the height of Aoraki was the beginning of what I now realise is a very important part of my practice.
What draws you to working with textiles?
The materiality of it. The fact you can see the work put into it. There are many mediums in contemporary art where people say “I could make that”, and most of the time with textiles it’s like... yes you could.. but it would take you several months and a lot of skill. Also, fabric is all around us and I like the intimacy of that. Our clothes, bedding, so much of what surrounds us is wrapped in fabric and it’s just a given but each and every piece of cloth carries with it a history. Fabric carries stories, we attach so much memory to it and to me it seems like the best material to use when exploring the topics I do in my practice.
Art is linked to desire and throughout history artists have transformed sexual energy into a creative force. Does this play a role in your work?
Definitely. I probably appear much more sexually liberated than I am in real life because of some of the content of my work. It’s important though, sex is what brought us all here and I find talking about it through art making is the easiest way for me to navigate my own sexuality. Though I’m much more interested in channeling that energy into an object rather than an orgasm.
The landscape plays a big part in the lives of this region, but is it an essential part of your life and art also?
Frequent contact with our natural environment is the only thing that keeps me sane. Also I think on some level as an immigrant to this country I use my practice to give thanks back to the land on which my feet stand. I worry about where our planet is going and if I can draw attention to both our arboreal environment as well as the soil in which their roots grow, hopefully it can begin a dialogue for the viewer on their own relationships to land.
What’s your dream project?
I feel very lucky because over the past few years I have exceeded what I ever thought would be possible and I have had to rewrite the answer to this question several times. Currently I’m doing an artist residency in Venice and to come back here to represent Aotearoa at the Venice Biennale would be pretty dope! So probably that?? In December I’ll be presenting at the 28th Slavonian Biennale in Croatia, and if that goes well I’ll be focusing more on international projects.
