Gordon Froud and Tyron Tewson
After accepting the invitation to Site_Specific, Gordon Froud began to muse on a form that he has worked with for the past five years. Sperm Baby is composed of the head of a baby doll, attaching one leg where the neck ought to be. In a manner typical of munificent Froud, he invited Tyron Tewson, an art student at the University of Johannesburg to collaborate with him. Tewson created a figure of a fat man in Froud’s sculpture class earlier this year. Together, the pair created Dust to Dust, in which about 300 clay slip cast figurines of Tewson’s Fat Men and Froud’s Sperm Babies were hung from a tree outside the Timbershed.
Gordon Froud is a realist. His work takes delight in the concrete and the tangible. Most of the other artists wilfully ignored the built environs of Plettenberg Bay, preferring the idyllic rather empty coast line. Froud and Tewson chose to suspend their sculptures outside the crumbling, roofless Timbershed to emphasise that men and most of their artefacts associated with their existence will return to the earth. Whether rich or poor, old or young, all will become dust. As the months pass, Gordon Froud and Tyron Tewson the only trace of this artwork that will remain is the ground tinged with the clay of the dissolved sculpture.
