Inkblots and their indices:

rethreading perception in the work of Igshaan Adams

Abstract

Igshaan Adams is a young artist from Cape Town, working in multimedia and performance. In his practice, Adams brings ways of seeing and also ways of being into consideration through meditations on objects, dreams, Sufism, family relationships and the changeability of selfhood through perception of these phenomena.

This paper engages with Adams’ affinity with objects, their agency and biography, and considers how his sensitive interventions alter their materiality, shifting the ways in which they can be seen. The ways in which Adams’ family relationships play out in the processes of making his sculptural works, and also in his performances, are then elucidated and related to his ongoing processes of self-enquiry.

Furthermore, I consider Adams’ latest body of work, a critical enquiry into the variable meanings of Rorschach inkblots. Adams reflects on the grounds for inkblot testing and, in so doing, tests and measures the nature of looking, perceiving and projecting.