Willem Boshoff

Willem was born in 1951 in Vanderbijlpark. He studied at the Technikon Witwatersrand and also obtained a teaching qualification.

After teaching for several years Boshoff became a full-time sculptor, painter and graphic artist.

“In August 2006 I visited the site on a number of occasions to get a sense of the scale and presence of the place. At the time the building was half finished, natural stones used in cladding the massive pillars were scattered about and the autumn leaves of a large Pin Oak (Ouercus palustris) blew about in the wind to the refrain of some unruly conductor.

The cathedral volume of the main foyer rises from the ground much like a clearing in a forest, with the large columns on the sides looking like the trunks of old trees begging for a canopy of leaves. The detached leaves from the Pin Oak gave me the idea of giving the foyer a vaguely tree-like resemblance. In Africa the traditional indaba or council takes place under a very special tree that invokes history and ancestry. Our universities and colleges with their institution of campus date back to a time when lessons were taken in the open field under a shady tree – in Latin campus is ‘field’.

I wanted to play the massive stone pillars of the leadership centre off against the frailty and delicateness of leaves precariously dangling about.

Leaves are so commonplace one might overlook the poetry that they offer. On the one hand they adorn the slender twigs of trees and on the other they are tightly paginated into volumes of books. I was attracted by the fragility and vulnerability of the autumn leaves of the Pin Oak to the side of the centre’s entrance, some last shadowy leaves still on the tree, with most of them disconnected, blowing fleetingly about in the gusty wind to offer strange music to the eye.

A search was launched to find similarly faded yet romantic leaves of paper documenting the illustrious past of the Standard Bank. After much investigation, 57 historical leaves were selected from the vast and interesting archives of the Standard Bank, documenting historical occurrences such as the client signatures of Cecil John Rhodes, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje and Jan Christiaan Smuts, official permission from England in 1863 to begin the Standard Bank of South Africa and a five pound bank note containing the first image of Jan van Riebeeck ever used on a bank note.

Originally I wanted to call the work ‘Autumn Leaves’. Later I decided on CLAVIS SCRIPTORIUM, Latin for ‘key of the text’ or ‘key that unlocks the place of learning.” (Boshoff, 2007)