b.1951, Johannesburg

A concrete poet, conceptual artist, and compiler of dictionaries, Willem Boshoff is singularly preoccupied with words; their origins, implications, taxonomy and texture. Giving shape to language, he makes the verbal visual and the written tactile. Among his most notable works is Blind Alphabet (1990 onwards), a series of object studies of uncommon words to be touched and held. Abaxial, acinaciform, acrolith, acromegaly – the list goes on, each term transcribed as wooden sculpture. Other similarly ambitious projects include The Dictionary of Perplexing English (1999), a collection of eighteen-thousand puzzling phrases, and Garden of Words (ongoing); the artist committing to memory the names of thirty-thousand botanical specimens. In all his wide-ranging interests – from ecology to politics, astronomy to philosophy – Boshoff remains primarily concerned with classification; with the ways in which the world is linguistically arranged. To the artist, language offers itself as material, meaning, performance and form.