Lost Horizon, Gallery 2, 2023

Exploring the unfamiliar is key to scientific discovery: observing the patterns and movements of nature from microscopic particles to the vast geographic planes of land, sea and ice. Our fascination with exploration beyond our planet generates new excitement of the unknown. Seeing overviews of these spaces helps us to make sense of them, mapping out our fragmented view of the physical world(s) and the various forces at play.

This series of prints, collages and handmade paper works are an exploration of imaginary landscapes and spatial planes inspired by our shifting relationship with the natural world. Engaging with ideas around construction, architecture, and notions of progress, the works attempt to create new mythical imaginings of the environment. These abstracted landscapes that are unfamiliar and somewhat dystopian, are speculative attempts at imagining new topographies. They look to humans’ constant desire to shift and change spaces for our occupancy. Images are dissected and collapsed into singular but complex platforms. The fractured imagery is a tool for deconstructing context and investigating notions of displacement and belonging. Since mapping has a history of colonialism, and of plotting “unchartered” space, this practice of construction and deconstruction attempts to reverse and re-imagine, in a sense unoccupying space.

de Wet’s practice centres around our increased sense of alienation from the natural environment and the spaces we inhabit, drawing attention to the fragmented nature of our current engagement with the world through digital interfaces. Concerns around space and how we occupy it, has lead to a fascination with boundaries, whether biological, geographical and virtual, and how these boundaries are permeable and shifting. De Wet explores the tensions between the organic and the constructed world, from surface and the subdermal networks, to the structural impact on the landscape. De Wet’s practice seeks to embrace change and create systems of order in a world that is complex and chaotic.