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ARTIST STATEMENT

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The notion of the ghost has become an important conceptual figure in my work. A ghost occupies an uncertain space between presence and absence: it may represent something that has disappeared, but also what remains, is remembered, and continues to influence the present. In my work, the ghost becomes a figure of transition—a trace of the past that accompanies us as we move towards something new. In Ghost (2026), I explore recovery, regrowth, erasure and renewal, considering how landscapes, living organisms and human memory carry traces of disruption while adapting and regenerating. I am interested in the hopeful processes that follow disturbance: the return of life, new growth, and the possibility of moving forward while retaining memory of what has been lost.

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The concept of spectrality provides an important starting point for this investigation. Jacques Derrida's notion of the spectre, developed in Specters of Marx (1994), describes the ghost as a trace that remains active within the present. The spectral exists between visibility and invisibility, presence and disappearance. I extend this idea towards the natural world, considering how traces of former landscapes, species, experiences and memories remain embedded within places after visible change has occurred. In an era of the Sixth Extinction, I explore environmental change, care and ecological resilience. Toso et al. (2020) argue that spectrality offers a way of understanding ecological loss in the Anthropocene, where environmental trauma continues to shape our collective future. Within this framework, the ghost becomes a figure of care, ethical responsibility and ecological remembrance.

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This enquiry extends my longstanding interest in place, space and site, particularly their relationship to utopia and dystopia, through the notion of a utopian green patch. Place is never neutral; it is shaped by memory, intervention, histories and imagined futures. A site embodies both traces of what has occurred and possibilities of what it might become. In the Ghost works, landscape is therefore a changing, layered space where absence and presence, loss and renewal coexist. Moving towards a speculative post-Anthropocene cosmology, the idea of a Green Bang, after the Big Bang, invokes a new beginning: a moment of emergence, regeneration and new life following climatic damage and ecological disruption. It imagines destruction as potentially becoming the condition for another form of becoming. Green here is not simply a symbol of nature or environmental recovery, but suggests the persistence and regenerative force of life itself, potentially in unfamiliar and unexpected forms.

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My imagery for the Ghost series originated partly from my own photographs of trees and shrubs wrapped for protection against the harsh Highveld climate. These forms of human intervention attracted me through their strange, almost sculptural appearance. The coverings transform familiar plants into ambiguous, ghost-like figures: they conceal while revealing, and signify vulnerability while simultaneously demonstrating care. The plants have not disappeared; they are being sheltered so that they can continue to grow. The wrapping becomes a skin, membrane or temporary cocoon—a space between one state and another in which transformation occurs beneath the surface. This notion of care is informed by The Care Manifesto (The Care Collective, 2020), particularly its emphasis on interdependence and the recognition that survival and flourishing are relational processes. In my work, the protected tree suggests that regeneration may require intervention, while acknowledging the possibility of a future beyond its present vulnerability.

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Water is another recurring element in the Ghost works. Like the ghost, water is fluid and transformative: it flows, evaporates, gathers, dissolves and returns. It can obscure and reveal, erase and preserve. My relationship with water is also connected to my experience of the 2017 Knysna fire, where water ultimately became an agent of extinguishing, recovery and renewal. Water can erase a trace while creating the conditions for regeneration. Erasure is therefore not necessarily an ending; it can clear a space for something else to emerge.

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The Ghost works consequently move between disappearance and emergence, memory and possibility, vulnerability and resilience. Ghosting becomes a figure of what might yet become.

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SOURCES CITED

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Derrida, J. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by P. Kamuf. New York: Routledge.

The Care Collective. 2020. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso.

Toso, M., Spooner-Lockyer, S. & Hetherington, K. 2020. Ghosts and the Anthropocene: spectral ecologies, environmental loss and care. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 3(4): 1063–1081.

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