RESERVOIR presents Over the Outwash Plain, a solo exhibition by South African artist Dale Lawrence. Consisting of new works created in 2024, this body of work utilizes materials such as packaging tape, paper and epoxy, sound, animal fat, and ash. The opening event takes place on Sunday, 1 December 2024, and the exhibition runs until 17 January 2025.At the second cutting of the hairpin bend on Ou Kaapse Weg—a mountain pass in the Cape Peninsula connecting the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town with the Fish Hoek Valley—an abrupt transition in the rockface goes unnoticed by passing traffic. Table Mountain sandstone at the top, the Graafwater Formation at the bottom. This change testifies to the existence of an inland sea that once covered the Karoo, back when a southern supercontinent still existed. At some point, Antarctica tore off, and the Falklands Plateau receded into the sea, only to come crashing back into the African continent and compress the Cape Fold mountains into being. Three hundred million years—a remarkably recent sequence of events in the excessively long geological timeline. When comparing the age of the universe to one year on Earth, this line of rock would have formed a mere eight Earth days ago. For those who can read it, this timeline is etched across the Cape, and the roadcut on Ou Kaapse Weg lies just a stone’s throw from where Lawrence lives and works.

While it is useful to think of supergroups and strata when encountering his work, what rises to the surface again and again throughout Lawrence’s practice are the underlying themes of sediment, erosion, and time. In 'Over the outwash plain', he returns to these teachings, reflecting on inevitability and incoherence and considering memory and language through the abstract fluidity of both geological and personal histories. When encountering a roadcut like the pass on Ou Kaapse Weg, there is a sense of modern technology meeting ancient history—industry and speed and commerce versus the passive formation of stone layers—in what feels like a permanent change to the landscape between opposing forces. However, if one liberates oneself from the short reach of our understanding of time—perhaps by considering the drift of continents or the rearrangement a glacier might achieve—a million years becomes a blink of an eye, and the current moment will leave its own sediment behind.

Central to Lawrence’s practice is his use of non-traditional materials that both embody and obscure meaning. In his 'Roadcut' series (2024), Lawrence employs clear and buff packaging tape to create four monumental works, placed at intervals throughout the gallery like a winding road. Each 'Roadcut' charts a remembered moment where we went through the earth instead of over, frozen in the tension between the tape’s transparency and, once layered, its unexpected opacity. In an uncanny way, the record-keeping potential of rock is similar to that of human recollection: tranquil, non-eventful existence is underrepresented, while calamity and trial are embedded in both stone and memory.

Catastrophic fire can also yield visible yet shorter-term changes—not only to the landscape it scorches but also to the dormant seeds coded through evolution to respond to heat and smoke. In contrast to the Roadcut pieces, Lawrence’s 'Over the outwash plain' works (2024) present a curious intersection of the biological and the digital. These pieces incorporate veldfire ash and cow fat, paired with single-channel audio derived from home movies. Lawrence has long been interested in the tactile material of fat. Originally taking inspiration from Joseph Beuys’s work in the same medium, Lawrence’s reading of fat as a substrate for art differs from Beuys’s hugely. Perhaps seen by more minimal-living cultures as a sign and source of vitality, of particular interest is its historic use as a binder for paint (the first nations of South Africa, the San, reportedly used it to mix charcoal and ochre pigment, presumably following whoever has been making rock paintings in the cape for the last 100 000 years). Cast in large slabs, the mixture of fat and ash resemble landscapes from above, their substance evoking a familiar feeling of bodyhood which in turn serves as a foil to the ephemeral quality of the audio. Extracted from VHS tapes and iPhone recordings, the sounds are restructured through noise compression software, layered and harmonised to form an auditory landscape. The result is a soundscape that speaks to the fragmentation of experience—in this case, Lawrence’s own: dinner with friends at a steakhouse, his young child singing in the bath, rain falling on Woolley’s Tidal Pool in Kalk Bay, his father filming his brother as a toddler with their dog in the garden.

These traces of sound that are themselves traces of memory, communicate the artist’s interest in the eventual indistinguishability of information. While researching his previous solo exhibition, 'Midden', Lawrence encountered the story of the first excavation at Peers Cave in Fish Hoek. In the 1920s, amateur archaeologists Victor and Bertie Peers hacked and blasted through the midden floor to uncover nine ancient skeletons. Decades later, archaeologist Barbara Anthony revisited the site, hoping that modern techniques might yield new discoveries. She unearthed incredible objects—stone blades, animal bones, shell beads—but after months of careful documentation, realised she was digging through a pile of discarded material tipped over the cave’s mouth by her predecessors. Time and context collapsed, rendering the artefacts as jumbled treasures, their individual stories dissolved.
In 'Midden', Lawrence reflected on digital detritus as a contemporary form of waste, considering the accumulation of our online existence through the lenses of death, hope, and the unknown. This new body of work preserves those themes but becomes lighter, buoyed by a sense of appreciation for the fleeting nature of life. Lawrence compares this perspective to the wonder of witnessing natural processes, and speculates whether the same might be possible for the flow of cities, commerce, and communication. A sense of wonder that stems from a simultaneous and contradictory sense of detachment and immersion. The same invested surrender we might speculate to feel in profound life happenings: birth, childbirth, death.

In 'Somewhere Over the South Atlantic' (2024), veldfire ash from a Kalk Bay fire is used as ink to print the entire edition of a single large-scale linocut. The image, printed onto multiple sheets of paper and sealed together in epoxy, interprets a satellite render of a storm approaching Cape Town, landing on the day Lawrence’s child Iver was born. Created by carving until almost nothing remains, the work reflects the artist’s curiosity about the peripheral – the unseen remnants of dust or shedding skin, ash after a home fire, soundclips from a home movie, office tape. Or in language, the blind spots created by centring on focal objects and their opposites; words forming points that define well but describe poorly.

Lawrence’s exploration of the ephemeral and the eternal also finds resonance in his treatment of text. His works often stitch together extractions from a multitude of sources - from literary sources like John Berger’s Pig Earth and John McPhee’s Annals of the former world, to digital ephemera like YouTube comments and Reddit threads. The words, often unrecognisable due to the extensive manipulation they undergo, reflect the collapsing nature of human communication throughout the ages and especially amplified in the digital realm. By making use of language models, translating texts from one source through multiple languages and back again, Lawrence captures something in the incomprehensible garble that the software produces that feels like the present. At the same time, the cadence and rhythm produced feels oddly soothing, even as the meaning starts to decay: Intent becomes thought, thought becomes speech, speech becomes writing, and so on, until its original meaning has changed entirely. The resulting paper and epoxy sculptures are intimate testaments to his broader tendencies of collecting without discrimination, materialising the immaterial.

At its core, 'Over the outwash plain' is an exhibition about the traces we leave behind—or don’t. Whether through mundane human relics or the ageless stories of natural phenomena, Lawrence reflects on how remnants endure and evolve, even as they are inextricably mixed and deposited into vast information pits, moraines or oceans or the internet. Perhaps considering it through the perspective of natural laws, we might find the frameworks to start to understand humanity, in particular why our individual ideals look so different from our collective actions as a species.


Text by Shona van der Merwe



With special thanks
Art assistants: Kilion Solobala and Daniel Mahlanga