In 2005 a series of power blackouts swept across the city and suburbs of Johannesburg. Mary Wafer had just moved into an eighth-floor apartment in Braamfontein from where she had a spectacular view across an often dark and silent city. This extraordinary sight – of a city that should be brightly illuminated laid out in almost-total darkness – generated a deep anxiety about the unpredictability not only of the blackouts, but of things in general. It suggested to Wafer our inability to predict anything with confidence, to be sure of what might happen next. This experience filtered into her painting in the form of building interiors imbued with a sense of the sinister. She sought to convey a sense of the unsettlement one feels over something that has not yet happened, to suggest the threat of something that is always imminent, never arrived at or concluded.

The paintings represent – as far as ‘representation’ is possible in her intensely dark palette – the interiors of apartment-block basements, the ceilings of parking garages with their tracks and corridors of lights and plumbing, and their deep corners and sharp turns. Wafer has sought to convey the mundane functionality of such spaces as well as their ability to generate shadows even though they seem to be in perpetual twilight. Her works gesture at spaces – actual, psychological – that are only temporarily occupied, traversed only as a matter of pure contingency. Such spaces are intensely familiar – we visit them daily but their purpose is always to convey us somewhere else. They are thoroughfares, holding zones, liminal spaces that we enter only in order to leave them. They generate an anxiety that is allied to the desire to move through, to arrive somewhere other than here.

Alongside these interior focused works Wafer is showing a number of generally smaller paintings from a parallel series drawing on a personal archive of found images and ordinary family photographs. These share something of the banally familiar yet unsettling quality, the slippages between knowing and unknowing, with the empty floors of parking garages, suspended ceilings and tangled wiring shifting in and out of the prints and larger paintings.

Wafer’s new prints and paintings crystallise many of the interests evident in earlier works that draw on images related to the architecture of movement and transport. In these, her references to alienating peripheral structures, such as freeways, bridges and highway underpasses, suggest exclusion and marginality in relation to space. The new works extend and intensify these concerns, making their sense of unease more provocatively interior.

Mary Wafer grew up in Durban. After three years of study at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, she relocated to Johannesburg and completed her Advanced Diploma in Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2003, Wafer travelled to London and Copenhagen where she was a fellow of the Royal Danish Academy but returned to South Africa in 2005 to pursue a Master’s in Fine Art.