Artist notes

This particular body of works - In the Wake of Echoes - takes as its inspiration Baie: a short story by Jan Rabie, a South African Afrikaans writer whose works have yet to be translated into English. Baie - a page and a half in length - is a very short, short story. Short even for a short story. And yet, it is full and complete. Nothing to add, nothing to remove. It fulfils Roland Barthes’s idea that stories complete themselves in the reader. And so Baie ripples outwards beyond its one and a half pages into a haunting novel reminiscent of the existentialism of Franz Kafka and Albert Camus.

The story of Mr. Wallis - who, through the night, alone in his apartment, acts out his many personas between two sets of mirrors wearing only a top hat - reveals itself not as a tale of madness and confusion but as the watchers watch and the city listens, unravels into a tale of urban loneliness; of the new kind of aloneness city life engenders; and the loneliness enforced by outward manners and personas designed to please others. Alone in his room, Mr Wallis plays all his hidden and possible selves, yet none are him.