​

My practice investigates the concept of worldmaking—whether natural, virtual, or personal. I am interested in how humans inhabit and construct worlds, and in the layered nature of these worlds as repositories of history, memory, emotion, and experience. My work frequently examines the tension between utopian imaginings and their counterpoints: dystopia and heterotopia. I am recognised for producing textured, layered palimpsests that address questions of place, temporality, and memory. My approach is interdisciplinary and intermedial, incorporating painting, ink, mixed media, collage, digital print, video, and sound. Colour operates as a conceptual device: emerald green signifies idealised spaces (both natural and virtual), while red invokes the body, fire, and transformation. Additional chromatic references—ash grey, sky blue, stone black, sulphur yellow, smoky white, silver, and gold—speak to alchemical cycles of renewal and processes of transmutation. Works are often organised as sets, triptychs, or mirrored compositions, reinforcing notions of recurrence and transformation.

​

Each day, I register more acutely the shifting dynamics of the natural world. Floods, fires, and erratic weather patterns have become a new evolutionary constant. Spring begins earlier each year, midsummer is disrupted by cold fronts, and droughts give way to sudden floods. In 2017, I lost my home to uncontrolled wildfires in the Southern Cape—an event that underscored the shared vulnerability of human and non-human systems. Although nature continues its cycles, these cycles are now inflected by the impact of human industry, emissions, and digital infrastructure. The environment has become a site of crisis, altering our sense of embodiment and reminding us that we are inseparable from its processes. While humankind explores the possibility of colonising other planets, the urgency of our relationship with Earth persists. Situated within the discourse of the Anthropocene, my Composite (2025) series engages the four elements—fire, earth, sky, and water—to address themes of evolution, destruction, and renewal. The angel trumpet flower functions as a central motif, emblematic of ecological precarity as its survival is threatened by overharvesting for medicinal purposes. Deafness and sign language recur in some works as both formal devices and conceptual metaphors, foregrounding humanity’s general reluctance to engage with environmental warning signs.

​

The Bitterbessie dagbreek (2025) series, inspired by Ingrid Jonker’s poems Bitterbessie Dagbreek and Op die Voetpad, contemplates grief as both a solitary passage and a catalyst for transformation. Jonker’s imagery of pine forest, road, and dawn resonated deeply after the loss of my home. These works extend my exploration of the shifting relationship between word and image, where meaning is continually re-formed. Existential metaphors are road as the walk of life; daybreak as the searing moment after disaster; landscape as event; and orange sky as process.

​

The Moment (2024) series centred on my piano—an object, instrument, and metaphor for survival and transformation. A survivor of the fire, the piano previously appeared in The Piano series as a symbol of loss and recollection. In Moment, it becomes a site for connecting word, image, and sound. The works were accompanied by short piano composition accessible via QR codes, making sound an active part of the viewing experience. I used onomatopoeia and comic-book speech balloons (dotted balloons whisper, jagged ones scream) to give visual form to sound and voice. Black ink lines and gestural paint layer polyphonic voices, suggesting consciousness in motion across physical, mental, and digital spaces.

​

This engagement with sound and language grew out of my earlier series, Song of the Philosopher (2023), in which I translated philosophical reflections into visual form to explore truth, wisdom, and our entanglement with the world. Conceptually, these works were grounded in Heidegger’s Dasein—human existence as always embedded in a web of objects, others, and nature—and his notion of Geworfenheit (‘being thrown’ into life).

​

The Matrix (2021) series examined ‘other’ spaces—virtual, imagined, and utopian—that intersect with lived reality. Drawing on Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, Derrida’s writings on illusion, and Baudrillard’s idea of the “liquidation of the Real,” I investigated how images construct alternate worlds. Haraway’s cyborg ontology framed my exploration of human–machine hybridity. Utopia, too, emerged as a matrix—an imagined place of hope.

​

Together, these works trace cycles of loss and renewal, grief and transformation, silence and sound. They suggest that even amid technological entanglement and ecological crisis, we remain capable of imagining, creating, and reinventing our worlds.

​