ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice is fundamentally concerned with worldmaking: with the ways in which human beings imagine, construct, inhabit, damage, remember and reconstruct worlds. For several decades, the conceptual axis of my work has been the relationship between utopia and dystopia, together with the unstable territories that exist between them. These concepts provide a framework through which I investigate place and displacement, nature and artifice, memory and erasure, technology and embodiment, catastrophe and recovery. Increasingly, my work asks how it might still be possible to imagine viable futures in a world marked by ecological precarity, technological acceleration and the persistent traces of what has been lost.
Utopia interests me not simply as the dream of a perfect society but as an impulse towards another possible world. It is a spatial and imaginative proposition: a projection elsewhere, towards something not yet realised. Dystopia, conversely, exposes the failure, corruption or unintended consequences of such projections. My doctoral research, Dystopia and artifice in late 20th century visual culture, established this theoretical territory early in my practice. Growing up and working in South Africa also made utopianism impossible for me to regard as an abstract philosophical concept. The country's history demonstrates how visions of ideal societies may become ideological constructions and how political, social and spatial orders can simultaneously promise belonging to some and produce exclusion for others. Consequently, I have never understood utopia and dystopia as simple opposites. They exist in a shifting relationship. The apparently ideal can contain the seeds of catastrophe, while damaged and dystopian spaces may retain the potential for renewal. Between them lie heterotopias, liminal spaces, virtual environments, memories, ruins, imagined landscapes and other alternative worlds. My work occupies these ambiguous territories.
My earlier practice was already concerned with boundaries, framing and the instability of meaning. My MA(FA) research, A hermeneutic investigation of the parergon in artmaking with special reference to Anselm Kiefer, examined the relationship between the work and that which apparently lies outside it. The parergon—the frame, margin or supplementary space—became significant because it destabilises certainty about where an artwork, place or meaning begins and ends. This concern with boundaries subsequently expanded into a broader investigation of space, place and site. Landscapes, cities, maps, roads, architectural structures, borders and virtual environments became means of asking how human beings construct the places they inhabit and how these places, in turn, construct identity. Works such as Real Crime (2004), delta (2005–2007), Zoo City (2007), Utopia Map (2009), Hanging Gardens (2009) and the later Ship of Fools series addressed the increasingly unstable contemporary world through combinations of physical and digital media. Urban space, surveillance, crime, mobility, technological mediation and imagined geographies became manifestations of the utopian/dystopian dialectic. The map, particularly, interested me as an apparently rational instrument that promises orientation and control while inevitably selecting, excluding and fictionalising. To map is already to construct a world.
The city similarly functions in my work as both utopian achievement and dystopian machine. It promises connection, mobility, technological progress and collective life, yet simultaneously produces alienation, violence, inequality and dislocation. In Zoo City, the contemporary city became a strange enclosure in which human beings appeared simultaneously as observers and observed subjects. In Real Crime, mediated reality and actual violence intersected. In Ship of Fools, the ancient metaphor of a vessel carrying a dysfunctional society became a vehicle for thinking about collective uncertainty and the precariousness of contemporary civilisation. These works were never intended merely as illustrations of social dysfunction. Rather, they examined the structures through which reality is framed, mediated and transformed into image.
This interest led naturally to digital culture and technoculture. I began working with interactive and digital media during the 1990s and have continued to move between analogue and technological processes. I do not regard digital technology as separate from the material world. Increasingly, our realities are hybrid constructions in which biological, physical, technological and virtual environments overlap. The screen has become another landscape and another site of worldmaking. Technology carries a particularly powerful utopian promise: enhanced communication, expanded knowledge, artificial intelligence, virtual environments and perhaps even forms of existence that transcend biological limitations. Yet technological utopia continually generates its own dystopian shadow—surveillance, simulation, disembodiment, information overload, environmental cost and uncertainty about the boundaries between human and artificial agency. My interest lies precisely in this ambiguity. Technology can generate extraordinary new possibilities while simultaneously destabilising our understanding of what constitutes the natural, the authentic, the embodied and even the human. For this reason, intermediality has become integral to both the form and meaning of my work. I work across painting, drawing, ink, collage, photography, digital manipulation, archival print, video and sound. Digital and physical processes repeatedly cross into one another. A photograph may become a drawing, a drawing may enter a digital composition, a digital image may return to paper or canvas, and a visual work may acquire sound, language or movement. Rather than treating media as autonomous categories, I use the movement between them to reflect the increasingly composite nature of contemporary experience.
A decisive shift occurred in 2017 when my home and much of what it contained were destroyed in the Knysna Great Fire. This transformed concepts that had previously occupied theoretical and cultural territory into lived experience. Fire collapsed the distance between dystopia as intellectual enquiry and catastrophe as physical reality. Home—perhaps our most intimate utopian construction—was revealed as radically vulnerable. The works that followed engaged with loss, exposure, memory and survival. In Bloot/Exposed and related works, fire was simultaneously destructive event, material process and metaphor. Ash, smoke, scorched surfaces and metallic or alchemical colours suggested both annihilation and transformation. Fire destroys form, but it also converts matter into another state. The experience intensified my awareness of nature not as passive scenery but as an active force beyond human control. From this point onward, the natural environment increasingly entered my practice as both subject and agent. The distinction between personal catastrophe and planetary instability began to blur. Fire, drought, flood, shifting seasons, endangered species and altered landscapes became signs of a broader ecological condition. What had seemed exceptional began to resemble a new normal. The Anthropocene therefore intersects profoundly with my longstanding investigation of utopia and dystopia. Modernity's utopian narratives of progress, expansion, technological mastery and endless growth have produced environmental consequences that increasingly resemble their dystopian inverse. Climate disruption and accelerating biodiversity loss confront us with the limitations of the belief that the natural world can be endlessly controlled, consumed or redesigned.
Yet I resist treating dystopia as an endpoint. The possibility of regeneration is increasingly important in my work. After fire comes new growth. After erasure, traces remain. A damaged landscape is not empty; it contains memory, residue and the possibility of transformation. This movement between disappearance and persistence has gradually led me towards the concept of spectrality. In the recent Ghost series, the ghost has become a central conceptual figure. A ghost occupies an uncertain position between presence and absence. It refers to something that has disappeared, but also to something that refuses entirely to disappear. In this sense, spectrality offers me a way of thinking about memory, landscape, ecological loss and survival simultaneously. The spectre is a trace that continues to act within the present. My photographed and reworked images of wrapped trees and vegetation emerge from this territory. The wrapped forms can appear wounded, protected, bandaged, shrouded or cocooned. They oscillate between death and preservation. They may suggest ecological casualties, but equally acts of care. Their ambiguity is important. The wrapping conceals the living organism while drawing attention to its vulnerability; it can signify burial while simultaneously suggesting protection and incubation. The ghost therefore becomes less an image of death than a figure of transition. This relates to my interest in liminality: states of being in-between. Between blue and black, presence and absence, natural and artificial, analogue and digital, destruction and regeneration, past and future, the work resists fixed categories. These liminal states allow apparently contradictory conditions to coexist. The dystopian landscape may already contain the beginnings of another world.
Concepts of care, protection and interdependence have consequently become increasingly significant. Ecological crisis cannot be understood only through images of apocalypse. It also requires a reconsideration of relationships: between human beings, other species, environments, technologies and future generations. Care is not sentimental in this context. It is an ethical position. To care is to acknowledge vulnerability and interdependence. The natural motifs that recur throughout recent bodies of work operate within this field. Withered angel trumpet flowers evoke cycles of beauty, toxicity, death and renewal. Bees point towards fragile ecological networks and the consequences of environmental disruption. Trees become bodies, witnesses and ghosts. Fire, earth, sky and water operate both as elemental matter and as symbolic structures. Nature is neither romanticised paradise nor dystopian victim; it is dynamic, vulnerable, resilient and profoundly entangled with human activity.
My use of colour similarly participates in this construction of worlds. Emerald and luminous greens frequently signal imagined or idealised spaces. Green can suggest growth, ecological vitality and the utopian desire for renewal, but its intensity can also make it artificial, digital or uncanny. Red invokes blood, flesh, fire, danger and transformation. Ash grey, stone black, smoky white, sulphur yellow, sky blue, silver and gold evoke processes of burning, mineralisation, atmosphere, alchemy and change. Colour therefore moves between material observation and symbolic worldmaking.
Music and sound form another important strand in this practice. My own history with the piano has allowed the instrument to become both autobiographical object and conceptual structure. In The Piano (2024), the piano that survived the Knysna fire became an extraordinary material survivor and repository of memory. It exists simultaneously as instrument, object, architecture and body. The piano also embodies a productive contradiction. It is governed by a system—keys, scales, notation, repetition and discipline—yet it enables improvisation, invention and emotional expression. It therefore mirrors the tension between constructed order and imaginative freedom that runs throughout my work. This enquiry expanded in Moment (2024), where image, word and sound became interdependent. Onomatopoeic words, musical terminology, piano sounds and visual compositions produced an intermedial field in which one medium evoked another. The work drew on ideas of existence, temporality and Dasein: being not as an isolated state but as being-in-the-world. A moment is fleeting, but while it exists it contains memory, sensation, sound and anticipation. Time itself becomes layered.
In Composite (2025), this principle of layering broadened further. The title describes both my material process and my understanding of contemporary reality. Worlds are composites. Identities are composites. Memory is composite. Nature and technology are no longer easily separable. Physical and virtual spaces coexist. The past persists inside the present while imagined futures continuously alter how we understand both. The use of sign language and references to listening and hearing in works such as Listen listen listen – Hear me! extend this enquiry into communication and its failures. Silence does not necessarily mean absence, just as visibility does not guarantee understanding. Communication takes place through bodies, gestures, images, words, technologies and sounds. The work asks what it means to listen within a culture saturated by information yet frequently unable to hear.
These concerns converge in my current thinking about what might exist after the Anthropocene. The possibility of a Sixth Extinction represents perhaps the most radical contemporary dystopian horizon: not merely the collapse of a political ideal or a city, but the potential disappearance of entire networks of life. Yet even here I am interested in what follows. My recent concept of The Green Bang deliberately reverses the imagery of terminal catastrophe. The Big Bang signifies an archaic beginning, an explosive emergence of matter, time and possibility. The Green Bang imagines another beginning: a post-catastrophic eruption of biological renewal. Green becomes both colour and proposition—a speculative future in which life reorganises itself beyond the worlds we currently know. This is not an uncomplicated ecological utopia. Regeneration does not restore what existed before. After catastrophe, the world is different. Some things disappear permanently; others mutate, adapt or return in altered forms. The new world carries ghosts of the previous one. This relationship between trace and futurity has become central to my practice. I am interested less in nostalgia than in how memory travels forward. The archive is not simply a repository of the past. It is material from which futures are constructed. Personal memory, photographs, damaged landscapes, surviving objects, fragments, digital files, sounds and ecological remnants all function as archives. They enable the past to remain active while being continuously rewritten.
My practice has therefore moved over several decades from questions about framing and interpretation towards increasingly expansive questions about how worlds themselves are framed, constructed and reconstructed. Yet I regard these not as separate phases but as a continuous enquiry. The parergon, the map, the city, the ship, the burning house, the piano, the endangered flower, the bee, the wrapped tree and the ghost all ask variations of the same question: where are the boundaries of the worlds we make, and what happens when those boundaries collapse? Utopia and dystopia remain useful precisely because neither can ever be completed. Utopia is always elsewhere, ahead, imagined; dystopia reveals the fractures already present within what appears stable. Between them lies lived reality: unstable, layered, heterotopic and continuously changing.
I am increasingly interested in moving beyond the binary opposition between hope and catastrophe. Ecological crisis, technological transformation and personal histories of loss make simplistic optimism impossible, but dystopian finality is equally inadequate. The ghost offers another model: something may disappear without becoming entirely absent. Such transformations constitute a form of worldmaking. Ultimately, my practice asks how we continue to imagine after disruption. What remains after fire, ecological damage, technological transformation and personal loss? What do we preserve? What must we relinquish? Which ghosts do we carry with us? And what kinds of worlds might emerge from the remnants?