In pruning the branches from the bush around my house into snippets of cuttings for the artwork AMBUSH, I came across some dry palm leaves. The large palm tree in front of the house had to be cut down to make way for a generator room and its leaves landed on the compost heap. The area where the fan-like ribs of each leaf join the main stalk has an interesting sculptural feel and after trying a few times with the pruning shears, I managed to cut small, flighty objects that appealed to me.

 

The pruning of the bush and the palm leaves took many months and while I was engaged in this repetitive action, I had a lot of time to think. Some of the thoughts like the black birds in Vincent Van Gogh’s last painting, Wheatfield with Crows (1890) seem to flutter through my mind. Many of these thoughts or ideas were quite useful and some of them were later translated into artworks. An inkling is the personification of such moments of slight knowledge or suspicion and INKLINGS is therefore the name I gave the work made from what looked to me like flighty palm leaf creatures. What further appeals to me about the word ‘inkling’ is the ‘ink’ part. It seems to denote that hints of thoughts might be penned down in ink.

 

 

Willem Boshoff