It was love at first sight for Lungiswa’s practice. Lawn was probably the first work that came to our attention, soon followed by Sleeping pools. The attraction was on multiple levels, a visceral reaction to the abrasive materials used in her works (broken bottles, barbed wire, petrol), the artificial/industrial colors, green mostly, and finally the very powerful narrative of exclusion and segregation. Sleeping pools, we learned, is not just a sculpture that defines the space around it, but also one that engages the olfactory senses because the liquid used in the sculpture is petrol. As Nkgopoleng Moloi in Art America put it “an image of suburban luxury disrupted by the material used to intensify flames during protests”. Obviously, this was not going to be a piece that we could display easily but the temptation was too hard to resist. Sleeping Pools was first shown in Poolside Conversations at Kelder Projects in London in 2017 and has also been shown by Akinci in Amsterdam. We cannot wait to show it again soon.
