Ralph Borland's spacecraft series

At first glance, Ralph Borland’s screenprints offer graphic depictions of the iconic spaceships from the first Star Wars film positioned over psychedelic space backgrounds.

This series of three limited edition prints were produced under the guidance of fine art master printmaker Wim Legrand at Black River Studio in Cape Town. It refers to wire-art culture in South Africa and Zimbabwe, based around the production of wire frame sci-fi spaceship, and a fabric perceived to be an African icon but with its origin in Europe.

They play on the existing practices of street wire artists in making items associated with popular movies, presenting itself as a combination of a knock-off brand and an original reimagining the Star Wars world. They also show the spaceships in a psychedelic African space setting against backdrops sampled from wax-print fabric designs. The well-known backstory of the ‘African’ wax-print is of a fabric designed and printed in Holland in the late 1800s, intended for the Indonesian market. It wasn’t well-received by its intended market, but was wildly popular when sold in West Africa, where the designs acquired their own local meanings. Still today, the ‘authentic’ or original wax-prints by the company Vlisco are designed in the Netherlands and sold in West Africa. While Vlisco remains a status symbol and relatively expensive, imitation wax-prints with their own designs, some made in Africa and some in China, have been made since the 1950s.

The cultural diffusion as presented with these wax print fabrics designed and made in Europe, intended for an Asian market and then finding popularity in Africa where they have been adopted as a symbol of local identity and culture, juxtaposed with wire imitations inspired by a blockbuster movie consisting of influences ranging from Sci-Fi and Westerns to Japanese movies, comics and a range of mythological sources, presents an act of ‘anthropophagy’ – the consumption and creative incorporation of external cultural influences.

The work continues Ralph’s interest in hybridity: in combining cultures and symbols, in connecting popular cultures and fine art, and in marrying art, craft and technology to create new forms”.