Eve De Jong
Johannesburg
Eve de Jong is a Johannesburg-based artist who works with a variety of materials, including found, reclaimed and recycled objects.
Message
Eve de Jong is an artist who works with a variety of materials, including found, reclaimed and recycled objects. She uses these materials – such as recycled plastic waste – to create sculptures and 3D works.
Eve was born in Cape Town, and raised in South Africa, Belgium and the Netherlands, before returning to South Africa where she studied Dramatic Art at Wits University. After having worked as a producer and director for a national television broadcaster (SABC) and several advertising agencies, Eve dedicated several years to full-time motherhood before returning to her life-long passion for art in more recent years.
Eve has participated in several group shows in South Africa including In-Response: Art of the Space Age, at the Jan Rupert Art Centre (2022) and Sculpt-X at The Melrose Gallery, Johannesburg (2022). In 2023 her sculpture Top Star was selected to be exhibited at the Turbine Art Fair as part of TAF Sculpt.
Eve lives and works in Johannesburg.
Statement
"The artist shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life." – Claude Lévi-Strauss
My work talks to the possibility of reinvention and second chances – for objects, ourselves and our planet.
Recycled plastic lids and bottle tops are reshaped and transposed to speak to the environmental challenges we face in a way that is bright, engaging and meaningful. Mimicking natural objects, my work juxtaposes the concept of “natural” landscapes with the “artificial” plastic destined to be entombed in the earth, but instead shaped into objects, decorative and filled with meaning.
Our sea and our land have become a dumping ground for waste. So much plastic, even that supposedly recycled sometimes ends up in the earth or sea. These plastic rocks remind us of the danger to the environment. Although they are part of it, they are not waste, but warning objects, illustrating the peril and potential of consumption – for they are also colourful, lively and beautiful.
I am inspired by the concept of the bricoleur, working with the objects to hand to create something novel, something unexpected, as well as the work of the Futurists. In their desire to throw off the shackles of the past and artistic and creative convention, the Futurists opened the way for radical new forms of artistic expression, including the materials of the industrial age.
And yet we now pay the price for our dependence on the vast industrial-energy complex, in the form of environmental degradation and global warming. I choose to work in a medium that encapsulates this terrible bargain – plastic.