For The Love Of Corrugated Iron: Mark Hilltout

It has long been observed that the human eye recoils from absolute flawlessness because it offers no point of connection. By contrast, we embrace imperfection and transience. We find beauty in things that are imperfect and decayed, in blemishes that only time can create.

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.

Mark said: “I don’t look for certain colours - I find them. I don’t choose certain surfaces - they are simply there. I am at the mercy of time and the elements and I know better than to try to compete with either. The more I study corrugated iron, the more I realise that the metal itself should dictate the composition of each artwork.”

“I bang it flat” said Mark, matter-of-factly. “Once you’ve taken out the corrugations and returned it to its original state, it becomes manageable. It becomes an endlessly different, gloriously imperfect canvas”. It was precisely this unpredictability that kept the artist’s eye enthralled and the viewers’ eye transfixed.