Time gradually coiled in wire

In a world that tends to move fast, Walter Oltmann works slowly — letting wire, insects and forgotten relics guide his hand

- Thembeka Heidi Sincuba

Stepping into Walter Oltmann’s living room feels less like entering a domestic space than crossing the threshold into a quiet laboratory of time.

Not the cold precision of a scientist’s lab but something closer to an alchemist’s den — where patience is transmuted into art and wire becomes the language of memory.

Navigating between clusters of coiled metal strewn across the floor, I pass a man attending to the house’s electricity, who gestures towards Oltmann and says, in jest, “All he does is sit in front of the TV, watching the news, working that wire.”

And indeed, there he sits — Oltmann, with fingertips hardened in silver residue — at ease, entangled in a kind of temporal ritual. Around him, wire sprawls like quiet potential yet, along the walls hang the finished testaments to this devotion — intricate works wrought from stillness, and on a small table, a copy of his monograph In Time.

In this modest Kensington, Joburg living room, time itself seems to coil, loop and settle — proof that something enduring will emerge from meditative modes of making.

Scrutinising an artist’s practice has a lot to do with understanding their origins. “I grew up in Nongoma and studied fine art in Pietermaritzburg.

“We had a very dynamic fine art department in Pietermaritzburg. I had a good general grounding course — learning a range of disciplines and techniques. But, already in my second year, my lecturers saw that I had a particular feeling for sculpture. So that’s where it began.

“I had a lecturer, Willem Strydom, who worked mostly in metal and stone. He had trained in Britain, and I was impressed with the way he worked,” he says.

Oltmann would later follow Strydom to Wits to pursue his master’s degree. It was there that his practice began to shift — he recalls trips to scrapyards alongside Strydom, who sourced materials for his robust metal sculptures.