Garth Walker

Garth Walker is widely celebrated as a key contributor to South Africa's emerging post-apartheid graphic design. This is no hollow claim. In 2004, Durban-based Walker was asked to design the lettering and signage for South Africa's Constitutional Court. His design solution, most famously visible at the entrance to the court, is a consummate expression of its location. After meticulously documenting all the visible lettering on this historically resonant site, including the prison graffiti and builders' markings, Walker combined these collected fragments, refashioning them into something new.

This process, of assimilation and reinterpretation, offers a useful entrée into the world of i-jusi. A limited edition print magazine published by Walker, i-jusi has long operated as a free space for the designer (and his extended network of friends) to play. Rather than try to excavate meaning from the diverse and occasionally whimsical experiments contained in his cult publication, it is perhaps useful to point viewers to a single, pertinent fact: Garth Walker is curious about the world he lives in.

It is a freewheeling curiosity, Walker's photography collection alone bearing testimony to this. Alongside works by Roger Ballen, Angela Buckland, David Goldblatt, Pieter Hugo and Guy Tillim, he owns a large collection of nineteenth century ethnographic studies of the Zulu people, studio photographs produced by Durban photographers Sipho Khoza and Moses Khubisa, as well as vintage photographs of Isandhlwana and Rorkes Drift. (Never mind the Cecil Skotnes vase, Zulu headrests or rare books on colonial-era Natal that fill his shelves.)
Much like the American photographer he so greatly admires, Stephen Shore, one could argue that Walker's project is essentially one of retrieval – of going to uncommon places and lengths to refresh the visual codes that guide our everyday encounters as social beings.

with thanks to Sean O'Toole