Chris Soal has built a creative practice around transforming and elevating the everyday. Born in Johannesburg and now based in Cape Town, he is known for reimagining materials like bottle caps, toothpicks, electric fencing cable, concrete, sandpaper, and rebar into layered sculptures and wall works that evoke everything from geological formations and coral systems to skin, sediment, and cellular growth.
By recognizing overlooked materials, he signals ideas of value, reflecting Johannesburg’s density and systems of extraction, as well as Cape Town’s atmosphere, coastline, and geological expansiveness. “South Africa gives you a very heightened awareness of contradiction. Johannesburg, especially, is a city built through extraction, tension, improvisation, and survival. It is a place of hard edges alongside incredible creativity. You grow up surrounded by visible systems of division and inequality, but also by an unbelievable inventiveness in how people navigate and remake the world around them. That shaped me deeply,” Chris Soal told Whitewall.
Whether transforming sandpaper into expansive topographies or thousands of toothpicks into biomorphic surfaces that resemble fur or fungal growth, Chris Soal creates works that reward slow-looking and embodied experience.
Chris Soal on Materials That Remember
Portrait of Chris Soal by Matt Slater.
Portrait of Chris Soal by Matt Slater.
WHITEWALL: Your relationship to South Africa—both Johannesburg, where you grew up, and Cape Town, where you’re now based—is present in your work, mainly through the materials you use and focus on. How has it shaped your selection?
CHRIS SOAL: A lot of my attraction to overlooked materials comes from that environment, from paying attention to what sits at the edges of value systems. A bottle cap, a toothpick, a sheet of sandpaper—these are materials that move through millions of hands and exist within economies of labor, consumption, and disposal. South Africa sharpened my sensitivity to those flows. Cape Town shifted something else in me. Johannesburg made me attentive to accumulation, density, and infrastructure; Cape Town introduced erosion, atmosphere, weather, coastline, and geology. Water entered the work. Horizons entered the work. There’s almost a movement in the practice from compression toward expansion.
“I become interested in a material when it suddenly exceeds its own function,”
-Chris Soal.
WW: You mentioned “paying attention.” How does your creative practice unfold thereafter?
CS: My practice usually begins with noticing rather than inventing. I become interested in a material when it suddenly exceeds its own function, when it briefly appears as something other than what I’ve been taught it is.
I noticed something small and persistent—the spiral formed by scattered toothpicks on a table, the bent form of a bottle cap resembling a shell, the imprint left by wood grain on worn sandpaper. What kept me with them was that they refused to exhaust themselves conceptually or formally. The longer I worked with them, the more layered they became. They started opening outward into conversations around labor, ecology, perception, systems of use, embodiment, and transformation.
The materials already carry histories and associations before I touch them. Concrete remembers construction and modernist architecture. Electric fencing cable carries associations of security, division, and control. Sandpaper exists to abrade other surfaces. Toothpicks are disposable, intimate, almost invisible objects. I’m interested in entering into a conversation with those existing meanings rather than imposing entirely new ones onto the material.
I also think there’s something important in staying with a material long enough to develop a real relationship to it. Contemporary culture often pushes toward novelty and constant reinvention. I’ve found value in repetition, return, and sustained attention—in allowing a material to keep teaching you over time. The process becomes collaborative, in a sense. I spend long periods working with materials until they begin to reveal unexpected formal or conceptual possibilities. Often the work emerges through repetition, aggregation, or erosion—processes that allow the material to slowly move beyond utility and toward something more ambiguous, unstable, or alive.
The Politics of Everyday Objects
Installation view of Chris Soal’s show “The Ascension” at MAXXI, photo by Giorgio Benni.
WW: You use processes like aggregation, combination, and erosion to transform objects. What draws you to these methods, and what do they allow you to explore about nature and culture?
CS: I think we often speak about nature and culture as though they are separate domains, but when you look closely, they constantly bleed into one another. Industrial systems imitate biological systems. Cities behave like ecosystems. Organic growth and technological infrastructure often follow surprisingly similar logics. The materials allow me to sit inside that tension. Toothpicks are processed timber. Sandpaper is industrially manufactured “land.” Concrete contains traces of geological matter. These materials already occupy an unstable territory between the natural and the constructed.
Through aggregation and erosion, I try to let those categories collapse a little. The works may initially appear organic, but they’re built from highly manufactured components. Or conversely, something industrial begins to resemble coral growth, sedimentation, fungal spread, or erosion patterns. I’m less interested in presenting nature as something pure or untouched, and more interested in asking how deeply entangled we already are with the environments we shape and inhabit.
“The studio has developed its own rhythm and language over the years,”
-Chris Soal.
WW: What’s your studio space like?
CS: I feel incredibly fortunate to have the studio I do. It’s on the third level of an old industrial building in Woodstock, Cape Town, with amazing views of both the harbor and Table Mountain. We inherited a former space that was used as an artist residency, and while we have incredible wall space to hang and curate our own work in, it’s not a pristine white cube at all. It’s active, dusty, loud, sometimes chaotic, often incredibly physical, and very rewarding.
There are stacks of materials everywhere: boxes of bottle caps sorted by color, thousands of toothpicks, rolls of sandpaper, concrete casts, timber, rebar, tools, prototypes, and fragments of failed works. Some areas feel almost like workshops or laboratories.
What I value most in the studio is that it’s deeply collaborative. I work closely with a team, and the studio has developed its own rhythm and language over the years. There’s usually music playing, multiple works unfolding simultaneously, and conversations happening while people sand, carve, weld, thread, or cast.
A typical day moves between very practical problem-solving and moments of reflection. One moment we’re discussing structural engineering or logistics; the next we’re speaking about geology, theology, literature, or art history. I enjoy that overlap immensely.
Looking Beyond Utility
Chris Soal, “The Yielding That Prevails,” 2025, photo by Giorgio Benni.
WW: What are you working on this summer?
CS: I’m continuing to push further into the sandpaper works, particularly around landscape, erosion, and printmaking histories. That body of work still feels very alive and unresolved to me, which is exciting. Alongside that, I’ve been developing a new group of works involving hollowed tree trunks, concrete casts carrying timber grain impressions, and toothpick forms that begin to resemble pelts, growths, or exposed anatomical structures. I began showing a few of these new directions at Art Brussels this year, and I really enjoyed the engagement they sparked with the audience.
Those works are opening conversations around martyrdom, ecology, vulnerability, and the body—both human and environmental. Specifically, I’m very excited to be showing some new works for the first time at Frieze Seoul in a co-presentation between WHATIFTHEWORLD and Apalazzo Gallery. I’m also in the midst of my first large-scale institutional commission, which will open to the public at the end of the year.
