Ghost (2026)
Selected works on The Will To Be exhibition, 6 August to 28 September 2026, Unisa Art Gallery ,as part of the academic staff exhibition.
The full series on Ghost, opening 10 October to 28 November 2026, White River Gallery, Mpumalanga.
Ghost — Artist Statement
The idea of the ghost has become an important part of my work. A ghost exists somewhere between presence and absence; between what has disappeared and what remains; and can refer to both the past and the future. In Ghost (2026), I use this in-between state to think about a world that is undergoing profound change in terms of technological and environmental change. Climate change has intensified and manifests in floods, drought, fires, earth quakes and species extinction. Digital technologies and artificial intelligence are changing what it means to be human. Our physical lives are increasingly mixed with artificial and digital worlds. Images can be generated, identities altered, memories stored and reality reconstructed. The boundaries between real and artificial, natural and constructed, human and machine are becoming less certain.
My work has long explored utopia and dystopia through ideas of place and space. The word ‘utopia’ carries an interesting contradiction: it can suggest a good place, but also no place—an imagined place that does not yet exist. Dystopia, by contrast, suggests a place where the hopes of utopia have failed or become distorted. Increasingly, these different states seem to exist alongside one another. Utopia is essentially a ghost that does not belong fully to one entity or another. Like the wrapped trees that appear in my work, it exists in a state of transition. The trees are hidden but still alive. Their coverings appear artificial, yet they protect the natural life beneath them. They become strange figures suspended between vulnerability and survival, nature and human intervention. Similarly, water imagery speaks about fluidity and change.
The work underpins the idea of a ‘Green Bang’ that in a post-Anthropocene cosmological sense imagines new beginnings after ecological destruction. It asks whether another world might emerge from the damaged landscapes of the Anthropocene and relates to the idea of a utopian ‘green patch’ as a happy place. Would this future be utopian or dystopian? Would it still be natural, or would nature itself become increasingly artificial, technological and designed?
