Biography

Sarel Petrus is a South African artist whose practice centres on the material life of objects — their capacity to hold memory, to endure transformation, and to gather meaning through handling and time.

Working primarily in cast bronze, he extends his inquiry into found wood and mixed materials. The process of casting is central to his practice. To cast an object is to preserve it and transform it simultaneously — to fix what was temporary, to give permanence to the found and the discovered. He works from objects collected over time: bones, shells, cameras, worn toys, natural specimens encountered in the field.

His works engage consistently with questions of memory, place, and displacement. A found camera. A Jacaranda branch. A bone held in the hand. These are not illustrations of ideas — they are the material of the work. The object already had meaning before it arrived. Casting is an act of confirmation.

Petrus is also a trad rock climber, and the two practices are not separate. The experience of climbing — rock, surface, fracture, weight, exposure, route-finding and endurance — is part of the same sustained attention to material and place that governs the studio work. Birds, bones and objects encountered on routes reappear in the sculpture. The climber and the maker move through the same landscape and carry the same things back.

Petrus lives and works in South Africa. His work is held in private collections and has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions.