The Artist

Fouché Hough (b. 1971, Cape Town), working as Ché Hough, is a visual artist based in Pearly Beach. His relationship with the ocean began as a surfer on the warm Indian Ocean swells of South Africa's East Coast, evolving into twenty-five years of global seafaring — from the ice fields of Antarctica to the currents of the Caribbean and the Pacific.

Today, his studio sits in a world-renowned marine corridor near Gansbaai, where whales migrate past while he is out kitesurfing.

The atelier is where the practice becomes sculptural form: each piece an anchor for the oceanic room.

The Practice

Marine Sculpture

The marine work operates as sculptural intervention. Each piece is conceived for the spaces architecture creates and then abandons: the double-volume interior, the tall column, the architectural void. Large-scale skeletons in hand-cast composite and reclaimed rope, they anchor the volume, resize the proportions, and bring the stillness that animates — the shadow that travels with the sun, the presence that elevates everything around it without demanding anything back. Their surfaces carry the weathered quality of the world's oceans, because they are finished in the same conditions that finish a hull.

Elemental Vessels & Light

Functional sculpture as material research. Bespoke ceramic basins, pendant lights, and sculptural forms, hand-thrown and kiln-fired in the studio. Each is approached not as commercial design but as a tactile extension of the primary sculptural practice — a functional object that carries the weight and presence of sculpture, glazed to capture the tactile quality of the coastal landscape. The daily encounter: the basin you wash your hands in, the light you read beneath, each one a small anchor in the rhythm of your day.

Architectural Surface

At the scale of the wall, the practice develops modular surface architectures — HIVE, a hexagonal module laid by the hundred into a continuous honeycomb, and Singular, a one-of-a-kind tile sculpted to a brief. Moving beyond conventional cladding, these hand-cast GFRC interventions apply the same hand and the same coastal logic to the surface that faces the weather. The wall becomes a living record of light and shadow, catching the day the way the ocean catches it. Explore the Surface line →

Material Research

The studio's material vocabulary was formed at sea. More than two decades of vessel maintenance and marine engineering produced an intimate, structural knowledge of resin, fibreglass, reclaimed rope, and stainless steel. These are the materials that survive the ocean; the studio now employs them to remember it.

Hand-lamination, composite repair, welding, and patina by hand — techniques forged under extreme conditions now govern a process of testing, curing, and finishing that produces sculptural objects built to last generations. The engineer's discipline — preventative maintenance, situational awareness, an exacting standard of finish — is applied to every surface that leaves the atelier.

The Primary Composite: A1 Resin

For the large-scale skeletal forms, the studio's primary medium is A1 (Acrylic One) — a Dutch two-component composite of mineral powder and water-based acrylic resin. It cures without releasing volatile organic compounds, which means the piece transforms the atmosphere of your room without leaving a trace in it. Clean air, deep light, and a material strong enough to carry the presence of a three-metre skeleton without the weight of stone.

Beyond its engineering advantages, the material offers a quiet conceptual resonance: a historical Cape lineage, shaped by the Dutch East India Company, is now cast in a modern Dutch composite that is, quite literally, VOC-free.

The Studio as Exposure Site

At Pearly Beach, where the wild Southern Ocean brings its weather straight from Antarctica, the studio itself functions as an exposure site. Surfaces are read the way a deck is read — for weathering, salt, ultraviolet light, and time. The coastal landscape is not only the subject of the work; it is a collaborator in its finish. Every piece that leaves the atelier carries the trace of this coast.

The Making

Poetic Taxonomy

A natural-history museum classifies; a sculptor interprets. At the southern tip of Africa the studio reads the ocean the way a navigator reads water — for the patterns beneath the surface — and translates those patterns into sculptural anchors for the modern interior.

The work is held as six such taxonomies — The Specimens, The Entanglement, Surface Tension, The Collective Body, The Invisible Law, and The Habitat — each a different way of reading the sea, each producing objects designed to alter the resonance of the room they enter.

Enter the collection →

Exhibitions & Context

The work first gained public recognition on the Baardskeerdersbos Art Route, where Fouché exhibited as a guest artist in 2024 and 2025; in 2026 it was shown at BBOS Art Gallery & Café in Gansbaai. Subsequent placements include Dallas Smith Gallery (Plettenberg Bay), Benguela Cove (Walker Bay), and The Great White House (Gansbaai).

Site-Specific Commissions

You have a space that needs an anchor — a double-volume void, a tall wall, a room that has everything except the thing that holds it all together. The studio develops site-specific works where scale, material, and species are determined by the architecture itself, collaborating with spatial practitioners, cultural institutions, and private patrons to create interventions that anchor a room with presence and provenance.

A commission is a conversation: we begin with your space, its light, its volume, its silence. From there, the form finds itself. Studio visits are welcome by appointment in Pearly Beach. Begin a commission conversation →