Cold Comfort 

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Wendy Fredriksson’s debut solo exhibition, Cold Comfort, comprises four sculptures, one nesting a short film from 2019 in which the artist dances alone with an imagined partner. Each work surges with energy, an emotional vitality that is enabled by a literal, plug-in-the-wall Eskom energy source. This sometimes-unreliable collaborator allows each work to properly function, to emit a signalling light from within.

 

Cold Comfort (2025), from which the exhibition takes its title, is a facsimile of a suburban door, made from a vacuum-formed thermoplastic polyester known at PETG. It is completed with cement step. The warm yellow glow emanating from this familiar threshold projects a hopeful intimacy – a leitmotif of the exhibition – that is possibly best encapsulated in the refrain of a long-ago song by The Smiths: “There is a light and it never goes out.”

 

Everything’s Fine (2025) is an ivory-coloured mechanical bull stripped of all its embellishments, but for its menacing red eyes, which tint the underside of its horns. Sourced from a manufacturer in Guangzhou, China, this amusement ride – developed by Texas bar owner Sherwood Cryer and popularised by the film Urban Cowboy (1980) – is reimagined as a kinetic sculpture. It rotates and bucks with controlled vigour beneath a skylight.

 

I Left a Light on For You (2025) is a kidney-shaped glass form lit from within by LEDs. The work incorporates glass light covers that the artist collected in Johannesburg from 2006 to 2011, before relocating to Cape Town. Recently transformed in a furnace with the help of a glassmaker in Sedgefield and further refined at Cape Glass Studio in Cape Town, these found materials linked to an earlier self – someone interested in art but not yet involved in its making – have taken on new life.

 

Vantage Point (2025) presents a film inside a reproduction of coin-operated binoculars. Once a fixture at tourist sites – before selfies shifted how we relate to place and self – this illuminated sculpture personalises the viewing experience. In the film Fredriksson dances with a man’s shirt, a stand-in for an absent partner, to a 1923 song by American bandleader Ben Pollack. The scene loosely references a throwaway moment in Ana Lily Amirpour’s Farsi-language film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014).

 

A biographical thread connects the four works in Cold Comfort. The specifics of this story are unimportant, only its central themes of intimacy and absence really hold any lasting significance for Fredriksson. In the gallery, what matters is the imaginative potential of her colourless, light-infused sculptures. Stripped of superfluous details and autobiography, Fredriksson likens the muted register of her site-conditioned presentation to a colouring book: the graphic outlines of each sculpture suggest an image, a narrative, an emotion, but it is up to the viewer to fill in the colours, to complete the real or imagined story.

 

A self-taught artist, Fredriksson has long maintained a studio practice spanning painting, photography, film and sculpture. Cold Comfort foregrounds her sculpture. This facet of her practice reflects a range of influences: from Erwin Wurm’s witty, performative objects and Robert Irwin’s luminous environments, to the experimental dynamics and convivial energetics of present-day Cape Town’s art scene, which Breakroom explicitly platforms.

 

Film, too, is a key reference. Fredriksson is an accomplished production designer. Cinema richly informs her understanding of sculpture, be it the idea of theatrical props as prompts for the imagination, or the power of light to arrest and focus it. Light is more than simply a signal that her sculptures work, are alive; it is an invitation to imaginatively engage with their latent, affective narratives.

 

- Sean O’Toole