Email: info@humanelephant.org  |  PBO No: 93000 29207

ELEPHANT ART

Elephants play an important role in the environment and in the archetypal consciousness of human beings, which no doubt accounts for the great attraction that humans invariably feel towards elephants.

If we are to accept the scientific declaration that all humanity evolved in and migrated from Africa into the world as we know it, then Africa may be said to be the memory of the human archetype.

Based on this, Dr Ian Player believes elephants to be embedded into the essential consciousness of humankind.

This may account for the warm and often tactile reactions that people of every age and culture have towards the sculpted elephants of Andries Botha when they come into contact with them.

Should you wish to enquire about elephant art , please kindly fill in the contact form at the bottom of this pages and we will get back to you.

THE MAN BEHIND THE ART

"Andries Botha sculptor"

EVERY PIECE HAS A STORY

"Art of a thousand words"

Wounded Elephant

TITLE:  “Wounded Elephant”
YEAR:  2008
DIMENSIONS:  6m X 6m X 5m (VARIABLE)
MEDIA:  Mild steel, Oak barrels, wax, sound and lighting components

“The ‘Wounded Elephant’ piece invites an arena of contemplation. The awkwardness and pathos of the fallen elephant creates the context where fragility, co-existance and our fragile  humanity are juxtaposed.  The monumental slumbering masculine fragment proposes an additional historical framework with poetic as well as didactic references.  Intelligence, judgement and values are subjected to scrutiny.  The installation invites the viewer, as the final interpreter of the juxtaposed elements, to complete the work and to script themselves as a protagonist in life’s perpetuating human drama, recognising that it is  individual intelligence that catalyses our greater and lesser decisions. “ Andries Botha, October 2008

Nomkhubulwane

TITLE: Nomkhubulwane
YEAR:
  2009
DIMENSIONS:  Height 3.07m , Length 5.57m, Width, 1.9m
MEDIA:  Galvanized mild steel, recycled rubber tyres

The Nomkhubulwane tour of North America was a creativity/environmental awareness drive using Nomkhubulwane as a metaphor which travelled United States and Mexico as a partnership between the Human Elephant Foundation, the Magqubu Ntombela Foundation, The Wild Foundation, Imagine Chicago, Papalote Museo del Niño, Municipio de Cd. Juarez, El Paso Zoo, Walmart, Office of the Mayor (City of Chicago), InterfaceFLOR, Illinois Institute of Technology, Field Museum, Bozeman Public Library, Project Nomkoo, Marygrove College, the Charles H. Wright Museum and numerous other organisations and individuals.

To accompany this tour an educational programme, designed by The Civic Knowledge Project, The University of Chicago, Division of Humanities, focusing on children, resulted in tens of thousands of children actively participating in the creative environmental relationship.

Nomkhubulwane also spent time in Europe and currently resides in Kloof in Durban, South Africa 

Ungayithenga inhlizyo nomongo wami

TITLE: Ungayithenga inhlizyo nomongo wami – (African curios)
The former portion of the title is in Zulu and translates into 
English as ‘You can buy my heart and my soul’ 
YEAR:  2006
DIMENSIONS:  VARIABLE
(9 life-size elephants varying from infants to a full size male)
MEDIA:  mild steel, galvanizing paint, 14 varieties of indigenous wood from recycled trees.

The elephant embodies the world’s romantic relationship with Africa. It is also a part of the colonial panacea: wildness can be contained, observed, studied, purchased and taken back to the ballrooms of the first world as a savage trophy.

The elephant also happens to be the largest living land based mammal. The expansion of our modernity, civilisation, threatens the existence of this animal. Our inability to coexist with other living organisms is also implicated in this metaphor of the artwork. It means our intelligence is intolerant.

It is important that this work was made up from recycled wood / trees. There are 14 different wood types in this work that were sourced from the city of Durban in Kwa Zulu Natal, recycled from deceased and fallen trees. Trees are the lungs of our world and are threatened by our expanding industrial and capitalist landscape.

You can buy my heart and my soul’ literally means that everything we have that is precious, is now subject to the willing buyer and willing seller. Both are implicit in defining the tragedy of the post colonial history that has preceded it. The dynamic of the willing buyer and seller persists into the present and underpins the social and political identity of the postcolonial. 

The work meditates on the nature of power and the mutual responsibilities attached to this and the vision we have of our future shared humanity.”  Andries Botha, 2006

Lux Themba

TITLE:Lux Themba
YEAR:
  2009
DIMENSIONS:  To fit into a 20″ container 
MEDIA:  Lead Wood (hard indigenous wood), galvanized mild steel, 120kg of customized galvanized hook bolts, washers, spring washers and nuts were used.

1.5 tons – rough estimate of weight of Lux Themba 
All wood was recycled from naturally fallen trees

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