Thinking of making with nature and interventions I can make to create. I love the fact that movement can be captured, but it also leaves a trace or memory and what to do with that has come to my mind.
With the drawing machines, I can explore other forces working and ensure as little human intervention as possible during the ‘making’. I capture the process and document it over time.
But my real question is how I want to represent this and continue exploring my own drawings or making.
In terms of place, I like the idea of seeing how the work can interact in different spaces, and that would be the challenge. I also like the idea of working more sculpturally – I have always enjoyed collecting materials in nature and bringing them into my studio, where they mostly become the subject of quiet drawings and are displayed on shelves or windowsills. I enjoy their structure and morphology. In land art, Arte Provera and even Minimalism, there are stories of the relationship between bodies, volumes and space. The tendency to collect remains and to ponder their structure and morphology tells me something about my own questions about making the ‘invisible’, visible – noticing the details in the small?
Installed within the farm’s rewilding and conservation zones, these slow-drawing instruments engage with the unpredictability of weather and movement. I am exploring how chance — the play of wind, the sway of twine, the drift of pigment — shapes both the drawing and my own artistic development. The process invites a surrender of control, allowing the landscape to become an active participant in the making. In this way, the project mirrors the farm’s ecological restoration: both are acts of patience, trust, and attention to what emerges beyond human intention.
I recently began experimenting with drawing machines that engage directly with the landscape. These simple constructions — feathers, charcoal, and twine suspended from trees — record the unseen movements of wind and time. Once placed, they no longer belong solely to me; they become instruments through which the landscape expresses its own gestures.
At Kloovenburg, this process finds a new and deeply resonant context. The farm’s ecological restoration efforts — through the replanting of indigenous species and the protection of the Swartland Shale Renosterveld and ancient Afromontane forest — offer a living example of how human and ecological systems can interweave. I intend to situate my practice within this shared space of care and renewal.
The drawing machines, in this setting, act as a threshold between human agency and ecological process. They bring human attentiveness — the act of tying, balancing, preparing — into relation with the rhythms of wind, growth, and weather. The resulting drawings are traces of collaboration, not control: a form of correspondence between art and ecology.
Through this process, I aim to explore how randomness and chance can deepen our understanding of place — how art might serve not as an intervention but as a form of listening. In the same way that Kloovenburg’s restoration work nurtures the recovery of the land, these works invite a re-seeing of our relationship to nature: as participants rather than observers, as caretakers rather than consumers.
Ash Dome, an extraordinary living artwork created by David Nash. The Ash Dome, begun in 1977, is an evolving, ever-changing artwork made from life itself, both a monument to humanity cooperating with nature and a work of modern art.