ENTERTAINMENT NEWS - Cape Town artist Ed Young has been awarded the 2025 Helgaard Steyn Prize for Sculpture for his work Other People’s Tears Are Only Water (2024) – a work that stood out for the judges amongst stiff competition. He receives R675 000 in prize money.
“The work is nothing. The work is a ghost. A physical indicator of a fatalistic world — the greatest show on earth. The award is the absence that contains it. It amplifies the gesture, visualises the spectacle, and lends it its meaning,” said a grateful and astounded Young.
The work consists of a fragment of an upright piano, purchased from the historic The Kimberley Hotel in Cape Town during the Covid lockdown, which has been cut down to measure a third of its original size, thereby revealing the inner workings of the instrument.
Working in the tradition of the found object, Young has modified the original instrument by cutting it down and including a battery-operated mechanism that enables it to play a high E, thus creating what the artist refers to as the “rectified readymade”. This approach was pioneered by Marcel Duchamp, and has been absorbed into various aspects of contemporary art.
The judges found the work gripping and commented on the successful nostalgic evocations suggested in the piece.
The truncated form of the piano, complemented by the incessant sound of the high E, creates a dramatic and atmospheric experience.
The work was described as embodying both outstanding craft and conceptual refinement, and hailed as a unique contribution to South African art.
This year’s panel of judges consisted of Dr Louisemarié Combrink (chair) from the North-West University, Prof Janine Allen-Spies from the University of the Free State and Mr Andrew Lamprecht, a curator at the Iziko South African National Gallery.
“The work has a haunting quality that suggests both presence and absence – the piano and the sound it makes are present, but there is no pianist, so that the object and its audio gain a sense of agency – a not-so-silent ghost that reminds the viewer of the country’s past, where the original piano bears echoes of the artistic rendezvous at The Kimberley Hotel where it came from. In many subtle ways, Other Peoples Tears Are Only Water can also be understood as a requiem to the past, highlighting how disembodied memory can live on in the fragments of objects,” according to a statement from the judges.
The Helgaard Steyn Award is a prestigious annual award recognising excellence in four disciplines, alternating between musical composition, painting, literature and sculpture.
Entries of work created between 2021 and 2024 were eligible for the prize, with Young being the 10th recipient of the sculpting award.
Young, born in 1978 in Welkom in the Free State, matriculated at Hoërskool Sentraal in Bloemfontein, and obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts (2001) and Master of Fine Arts (2005), both cum laude, at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. He has exhibited locally and globally, including in the USA, Switzerland, Germany and Spain.
Past recipients of the Helgaard Steyn Award for Sculpture are David Brown (1989), Jackson Hlungwani (1993), Gert Swart (1997), Willem Boshoff (2001), Jan van der Merwe (2005), Andrieta Wentzel (2009), Wim Botha (2013), Angus Taylor (2017) and Mary Sibande (2021).
Visit www.HelgaardSteynAwards.co.za for more information.
Ed Young. Photo: Nina Lieska Repro Pictures
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