“My work celebrates the art of reinvention, the resilience of forgotten materials, and the symbolic relationship between the artist, the medium and the viewer.”
Mark Hilltout was always drawn to the random, the discarded and the broken. Car dumps fascinated him. He was attracted to the broken edge, not the perfectly straight line. He saw beauty where others saw ugliness. For 12 years he looked intently at something that most of us try to ignore. Corrugated iron. (The word comes from the Latin ‘Ruga’ meaning to wrinkle or crease). To the conventional eye, this is a poor man’s shelter to be used only in the absence of alternatives, a reminder of global inequality. Yet almost 2 centuries after its invention, it remains indispensable.
To Mark, it was all of that but it was also endlessly complex and gloriously tarnished; something that time alone can create and no artist can hope to better. Burnt by the sun, flayed by wind and rain, each sheet is the result of thousands of happy and unhappy accidents - the perfect, imperfect material. His love affair with corrugated iron began in Madagascar, where he learned how to sew in metal and started producing rustic picture frames. He sought out and bought discarded sheets from Khayelitsha and neighbouring towns. Out of 100 sheets perhaps only 10 were suitable. And all were unpredictable.
To Mark, it was all of that but it was also endlessly complex and gloriously tarnished; something that time alone can create and no artist can hope to better. Burnt by the sun, flayed by wind and rain, each sheet is the result of thousands of happy and unhappy accidents - the perfect, imperfect material. His love affair with corrugated iron began in Madagascar, where he learned how to sew in metal and started producing rustic picture frames. He sought out and bought discarded sheets from Khayelitsha and neighbouring towns. Out of 100 sheets perhaps only 10 were suitable. And all were unpredictable.
