STATEMENT OF WORK

I grew up in Cape Town on the slopes of Table Mountain. Alongside my brother, we constructed elaborate tales of make-believe worlds from our overgrown African garden. Climbing trees — the rough boughs, like huge hands, holding us. As we watched the world from our perch, it felt like our private refuge.

While my childhood seemed idyllic, Apartheid’s presence loomed in the background. Grappling with complexity and resistance have informed my work ever since. I continuously recontextualize and reshape, surrendering to  unpredictability with a focus on making beautiful, ugly and curious things. By partnering with my materials, their physical form and presence gain meaning. I hold my process dear, remaining deliberately askew from contemporary expectations.

My hands are both constructive and destructive forces. I break work when I’m frustrated to see what I might find inside; in this way I banish preciousness, release control, and move beyond anything I imagined. What I find is often more honest.  After these impulsive moments, I am supercharged—alert—like my ears have pricked up. Sometimes, I also feel remorse.

Fragmented and raw, my mixed media sculptures tower free-standing, hang, or are propped on walls. Mixing flat pattern and linear perspective, I create spatial discrepancies to unsettle the way we see and distort what is familiar.

I choose wire, raffia, string, and cardboard for their structural malleability and accessibility. I bend, knot, and bind them, introducing color for subtlety.  There are trails of scars, peelings, and stripped-away remnants.  Each repositioned part reveals a change of heart, reflecting the imperfect presence of the human hand.

 A Palace of Winds, The Book of Moonlight, and The Sorcerers Map are titles borrowed from Michael Ondaatje’s writing. I turned to his language after the work had taken shape because his fragmentary prose echoes their ambiguity.