About

Jacques van der Merwe (b. 1974, London → South Africa → Australia, 2008) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice—spanning more than three decades—engages with themes of immigration, forgetting, time, memory, loss, entropy, and sedimentation. His early work in South Africa responded to questions of identity, unrest, and invasion, often employing police certification stamps as potent symbols of enforced identity and transformation. Van der Merwe studied at Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art, where he completed a Doctor of Visual Arts supported by a Griffith University Postgraduate Research Scholarship. Now based near Brisbane, he produces sculptures, videos, drawings, and installations that draw on strategies of trace, inframince, and empreinte to evoke the emotional and material residues of history.

His recent exhibition, The Morphology of Transience, unfolds within vitrines—glassed enclosures that frame memory’s tension between the fleeting and the enduring. Works such as Memory Blocks: Veil, Procedures of Memory, The Scream, Blouapie, Red, Memory Blocks: Ma/Mother, and The Secret embody metaphors of forgetting, entropy, trauma, ritual, and remembrance through fragile yet resonant material forms.

Biography

1974 Born London United Kingdom

1974 Arrived in South Africa

1993 Pro Art school of Art, Music, Drama and Ballet

2008 Arrived in Australia

2020 Masters in Visual Art (MAVA) with Distinction, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University

2021 - 2025 Doctor of Visual Arts (DVA), Queensland College of Art, Griffith University