(Part III of an anthology of writings about an installation with mixed media, called Walk the Line. This work is about place and, in part, about the discovered layers of history of a rural community in the Swartland area of South Africa.} What the land holds – Before the rails The weight of history Before […]
Fragments Anthology Part II (Unearthing the invisible histories of a rural Swartland community through mixed media and fragments. As the second part of this ongoing writing anthology, these texts gather what is recorded in local archives and trace how those quiet layers linger on the ground today.) A container that ventures outside the safety of […]
It seems I am getting to a place where I can say that making is meaning. My reading took me to an article (Materiality & Process: The Physical Act and Properties of Materials as Central Meaning in Contemporary Art-Making Francis Ankyiah1 , Frederick Bamfo). Here, the idea is to rethink artistic meaning, going beyond a […]
I am thinking about how the materials I work with create a starting point for reflections on memory, community, and my relationship with place, and how this then continues to present in the next making. When working with or in nature—whether creating nest shapes, hollow forms, drawings, or weavings—I find myself continually meditating on the […]
I want to explore a hybrid and fragmented form of writing about making Walk the Line. My conceptual thinking about walking is based on the idea of it becoming a vessel or bag that holds disparate things together along the way. I like how these things are all like a nest/weaving/contaier, as they look as […]
The scroll and the steel I. The Vessel My artistic practice connects with a decommissioned railway line that runs parallel to a dirt road at the entrance of the wheat and sheep farm where I live in the Swartland. This landscape places me roughly ninety kilometres Northeast of Cape Town. I set out to document […]
I ordered mulberry paper, which I hope is 100% Kozo, from China—the very same fibre known as Kozo in Japan and Hanji in Korea. Here is something incredibly grounding about knowing that the very same plant fibre I will be rubbing and massaging with water and muscle power has kept ancient ecosystems and crafts thriving […]
An AI-created image. The above image of a small-scale installation is very close to how the work was done in a pine forest. The core of the work is an ecological collaboration showing smudges, faint lines, and deep charcoal burns, which serve as a literal indexical record of the Swartland’s atmospheric energy between late 2025 and January […]
The wonderful thing that happened is that walking and making art asked of me not only to research the new encounters, but also to become a bit of a botanist, and this I really love! Below is a list I started to keep, but I need support from the INature group to qualify and verify […]
Yesterday, along the rail walk, I realised that I have come to an intersection where the iron meets the paw, and the shrubs along the way are not empty; they have become a library. The railway has been reframed in my mind – it is a path of animals, not just trains. I know that […]