“I remember growing up, when my parents would go to church, my brother and I would ransack their cupboards, looking for things we would usually be prohibited from seeing and touching. One of these was a medical textbook, in which we would find images that were interesting or salacious, like an illustration of the male reproductive system with a cross-section view of the penis. When you look at these printed illustrations or photographs in a book, they appear seamless, but on closer inspection, you realise that they’re composed of small printed dots that hang on a grid. Later, I came to realise that the grid serves different, complex functions. It speaks of a modernist desire for delineation and control, but it was also the first acronym used to describe HIV/AIDS, which was initially called Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. I came to understand the grid as a loaded device, one that framed my understanding of queerness and selfhood in a significant way.” 
– Ernst van der Wal

Participants in the Uncertain Entanglements colloquium convened by Kathryn Smith, Leora Farber and Christo Doherty reflect on the role of art and science interactions in their respective practices at Three Bones Residency, Cape Town.

“Samuel Makoanyane had a relationship with an art dealer C.G. Damant, who exhibited and sold Makoanyane's pieces in a trading store in the 1930s. He advised Makoanyane to make them smaller, because packaging and weight were critical for transportation. A genius thing happens with scale. When something becomes extremely small, it becomes extremely monumental. It exists in the space of the imagination, because it doesn't become the equivalent of something else. You know it is in and of itself. In miniature, it has power.”
– Steven Sack

Participants in the Uncertain Entanglements colloquium convened by Kathryn Smith, Leora Farber and Christo Doherty reflect on the role of art and science interactions in their respective practices at Three Bones Residency, Cape Town.

“The Kirby Collection has seven Samuel Makoanyane figures of musicians, commissioned by Prof Percival Kirby in 1935. Kirby's monograph The Musical Instruments of the Indigenous People of South Africa was published in 1934, and a copy was sent to Lesotho for Makoanyane to use as reference. He worked with visual source material all the time. He's looking at women in the village, and carefully analysing anatomy before he makes his figures. That made him a modernist, an artist of the 20th century.”
– Steven Sack

Participants in the Uncertain Entanglements colloquium convened by Kathryn Smith, Leora Farber and Christo Doherty reflect on the role of art and science interactions in their respective practices at Three Bones Residency, Cape Town.

“When Samuel Makoanyane wrote letters to his art dealer C.G. Damant, he would end by saying, ‘I lay down my pen’ (KE LIHA PENE). It struck me that when he made these pieces, he laid down his stylus at the end. He makes the figure, and then it is animated through the drawing.”
– Steven Sack

Participants in the Uncertain Entanglements colloquium convened by Kathryn Smith, Leora Farber and Christo Doherty reflect on the role of art and science interactions in their respective practices at Three Bones Residency, Cape Town.

“I'm most interested now in the role of creativity in science. Engineers come to the Cape Town Science Centre and do presentations. They talk about creativity, and I'm asking: What do you mean? What does that mean? And they can't really tell me.”
– Steven Sack

Participants in the Uncertain Entanglements colloquium convened by Kathryn Smith, Leora Farber and Christo Doherty reflect on the role of art and science interactions in their respective practices at Three Bones Residency, Cape Town.

“I just finished a big research project on the history of Basotho blankets, and the exhibition is now in Johannesburg. We have information about the blankets from the 1840s and 1910s. Samuel Makoanyane’s sculptures gave us information about the 1930s. In numerous figures the women are wearing blankets, and you can see the treatment and the pattern, which tells us about those early blankets.”
– Steven Sack

Participants in the Uncertain Entanglements colloquium convened by Kathryn Smith, Leora Farber and Christo Doherty reflect on the role of art and science interactions in their respective practices at Three Bones Residency, Cape Town.

“The idea of walking raises the question of when we start. When are we first bipedal? When do we start walking? And how is that achieved? And what exactly is the nature of the foot? Often scientists have to extrapolate from just one fragment of a skeleton, and more recent finds are transitional specimens. If you find a hand, you might think it's Homo sapiens. Even in those earlier characters with very long arms and short squat bodies and small brains, their hands and feet look like Homo sapiens. You have to have more complete skeletons to be able to arrive at better information.”
– Steven Sack

Participants in the Uncertain Entanglements colloquium convened by Kathryn Smith, Leora Farber and Christo Doherty reflect on the role of art and science interactions in their respective practices at Three Bones Residency, Cape Town.

“William Wordsworth promoted the idea of walking as a way of generating ideas and poems. He walked with his sister Dorothy, who was completely in love with him. She was in the shadows, but from what I can gather Dorothy walked along with him. He'd spout poetry, and she'd write it down. According to Rebbeca Solnit’s Wunderlust, the earliest phases of the grand English houses would have galleries for walking. The gallery then becomes the place for displaying art. It's quite interesting how it evolved. Wordsworth and Coleridge started to break that boundary.”
– Steven Sack

Participants in the Uncertain Entanglements colloquium convened by Kathryn Smith, Leora Farber and Christo Doherty reflect on the role of art and science interactions in their respective practices at Three Bones Residency, Cape Town.