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 a 6km walk as a regular pilgrimage, utilising photography, sound recordings, drawings, and documentation. As a thinking structure, borrowed through the lens of Ursula K. Le Guin, my scroll becomes a vessel—a “carrier bag” for holding disparate elements together: time, the objects and oral histories I gather along the way, the complex lineage of the rail, and the lived experiences of the people who still navigate this valley. In this methodology lies my own inquisitive spirit and the messy process of making and gathering as you move.
It is not about walking a straight line to the old station building in Riebeek West. It is an act of collection. On my first walk, I invited members of the community, as it coincided with the commemoration of the line’s opening on 3 April 1948. Not only did I have companions on the walk, but stories were also being shared on social media, and connections about the history of this rail were being made between the community and me.
II. Three Interlocking Rings
The rails first caught my attention when I looked closely at their inside curves. Pressed into the cold metal is a manufacturer’s stamped seal, forged by Krupp, a German industrial giant, dated 1928. During the early twentieth century, Krupp became a major global supplier of high-quality cast steel for international railway components, including the rails, steam locomotive axles, and springs utilised by the then-South African Railways (SAR).
The manufacturer’s logo features three interlocking rings, a design celebrating their famous invention of the seamless railway tyre.
But looking down at the ballast, my eyes play a trick on me—or perhaps it is an act of psychological survival. I am struck by an instance of pareidolia: where industrial efficiency intended an abstract geometric emblem of steel, I see the unmistakable outline of a heart. There is a strange, jarring friction in this projection. This mark was forged a century ago across an ocean, designed by an empire built on extraction and heavy weaponry, brought to this valley to haul wealth away from the land. And yet, stamped into the iron, it presents itself to the walker as a symbol of vitality and care. It sits silent in the dirt, a cold mechanical ghost mimicking the rhythm of a pulse.
III. The Measure of a Rail
Keen to hear and preserve the stories shared by those who once rode the train, or who still walk this land, I walk with an unusual companion: a long paper scroll cut to the exact length of a single steel rail—thirty-three feet.
Armed with this paper vessel, my walk slows to a deliberate, rhythmic crawl. The scroll becomes a physical ledger of the valley’s friction. I press the paper against the iron, using charcoal to pull the texture of the 1928 Krupp stamp onto the surface. On the right-hand margin of the paper, I press small discs of air-drying clay into the steel logo, leaving a repetitive, structural imprint every single meter.
But the archive refuses to stay purely industrial. The landscape forces its own ink onto the page. The deep purple juices of wild olive berries crush against the fibres, leaving permanent, organic stains. The sharp, dry branches of the tolbos scratch chaotic, unpredictable graphite-like marks across the surface as it tumbles past. At one point, the walk yields a quiet testament to mortality—the delicate, intact skull of a bird carcass, which I stop to draw directly onto the stained paper.
IV. Walk the Line: The Gallery as Landscape
The walk does not truly end when I step off the ballast; it translates into a physical topography inside the studio. The final iteration of this practice is an installation titled Walk the Line. (To me, it is a gathering of what stayed behind on the paper over time)
In the space, the thirty-three-foot paper scroll hangs vertically, suspended from above like a monument to the rail’s architecture, before dropping onto a low table. The transition from the hanging paper to the horizontal surface mirrors the physical shift of my body—from tracking the upright history of the valley to looking down at the minute, immediate details of the earth.
Arranged across this low table is the physical inventory of my carrier bag. These are the fragments gleaned from the grit between the sleepers: the delicate, hollow architecture of the bird skull, loose feathers caught in the wind, bleached snail shells, and the clay discs stamped with the industrial ghost of the Krupp empire.
By placing the paper alongside these tactile relics, the installation acts as a translation of the railway line itself. The viewer is invited to slow their pace, to look down, and to navigate this landscape of fragments just as I did. It is a preservation of patterns—an archive of a walk that refuses to let these fleeting, overlooked details of the Swartland be lost to the speed of the outside world.
To me the scroll unrolls the way a walk unfolds — one continuous, linear thing you move through slowly, in sequence, rather than taking in all at once.
It also physically holds the marks of handling and time, the way the rail line itself does.
Learning
The artwork isn’t the drawing on the paper; it’s the connection that happened along the walk.
The artwork isn’t the drawing on the paper; it’s the paper’s physical contact with the space.
The paper here acts as a fragile, physical record of memory and displacement.
There is a connection between rubbing and care;
Rubbing is a drawing gesture which is about care.