African Art Fusion

African Art Fusion is a collaboration between Martin Osner and Simon Shone, and it exists because neither of us could have made this work alone.

Simon is a master goldsmith, craftsman and sculptor. He has worked with noble metals since 1987, trained under a renowned German designer, and built a signature style that catches the essence of form and movement, most often in wildlife. What he makes in gold, silver and bronze is never merely decorative. They are conversation pieces, and his work has been collected by people who could buy anything, among them Ernie Els and Lance Armstrong.

My own path started with an unexpected introduction to photography in 1984, and ended up somewhere between painting and fine art photography. I look for simplicity and honesty, and for the emotional connection that makes a picture worth living with. Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, Matisse and Pollock are all in there somewhere, which is an odd set of influences until you see the work.

Three ways of making one piece

There is no fixed method, and that is deliberate.

Sometimes Simon sculpts the three dimensional elements first, and I build the scene around them, which means the photograph has to serve something that already exists. Sometimes it runs the other way, and one of my landscapes or urban scenes suggests what Simon should make for it. And sometimes we work entirely apart for weeks, then put the two halves together and find out whether they belong to each other. Not all of them do.

What comes out is a single object holding sculpture and photograph at once, so a piece reads as a photograph from across the room and as something you want to touch when you get close to it.

What the work is about

The subjects are African and contemporary: bushveld landscapes, the elephant and the leopard, the fish eagle over the Okavango, Table Mountain, city streets, and work that lets go of the subject altogether.

It is deliberately joyful. Nothing in this collection is nostalgic, and nothing in it is an apology. Simon and I are friends before we are collaborators, and we share a faith, which is probably why the work argues for beauty rather than against anything.

Prints and originals from this series are sold through Osner Art Gallery, not on this site.