The objects Mqeku makes shapeshift in your hands, changing from sand to clay to metal. This work happens in the membrane between the tool, the imprint, and the trace. In this theatre, the artist reveals clay’s capacity for memory. These works are conceived of as a requiem to technical traditions that are fast being relegated to the past, “eclipsed by the excessive digitisation of the human industrial ecosystem”. These objects, Mqeku says, recall the “algorithm of the soul”, the ineffable workings of “imagination, thought, dream, and intuition”. By digging into the sand, Mqeku reaches into chthonic archives. The sand is a living archive. This capricious body holds memory; each grain of sand is a well-travelled fragment. Sand systems hold fragments of lime-petrified plants, volcanic eruptions, the calcareous shells of sea creatures, the frost-bitten sands cast off by Ice Age winds, and roughly hewn mountain quartz. Harvesting sand from the Caledon river, Mqeku builds sandcastles in relief, using moon-white 3D-printed tools to cast enigmatic markings which he presses into the sand. He then pours clay slip into this well and watches as it rushes into the furrows of sand, pressing tenderly into the edges of the imprint, winding its way into remembered forms.

The artist speaks of sand, metal, clay as a Holy Trinity, the most essential compounds of the earth itself. Mqeku’s acknowledgement of each element is ritualistic, a recognition of the almost superhuman world, a gesture of respect. And yet this work is about more than the substrate. It is work that knows that to dwell in the earth, to lie on its cool crust, to be buried in the mud, is to have eyes affixed to the heavens. His recent work, a chrome oxide and copper green glazed sand- cast form called 452b Horizon (2022), references the planet Kepler-452b, a super-Earth beyond our solar system orbiting the inner rim of the habitable zone of a sun-like star. This corpus, like a meteorite hunk from a distant Earth, dreams of a home far away.