ARTIST STATEMENT

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The notion of the ghost has become an important conceptual figure in contemporary theory, extending far beyond its supernatural associations. The figure represents a lingering presence of what has been lost, forgotten, displaced, or suppressed. In Ghost (2026), I explore environmental change, care and ecological resilience in an era of the Sixth Extinction. The works have been developed from my own photographs of ghost-like trees and shrubs wrapped in white for protection against the harsh Highveld climate.

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Central to the series is the concept of spectrality, drawing on Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx (1994). Derridean spectrality posits ghosts not as supernatural beings but as traces of what continues to haunt the present. The ghost occupies the threshold between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence. Building on this idea, Toso et al (2020) argue that spectrality has become an important way of understanding ecological loss in the Anthropocene, where extinct species, damaged landscapes and environmental trauma continue to shape our collective future. Within this framework, the ghost becomes not only a figure of mourning, but also one of care, ethical responsibility and ecological remembrance.

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In terms of the notion of care, the Ghost series is further informed by The Care Manifesto (The Care Collective 2020). The manifesto's understanding of care as a collective political and ecological practice resonates with the spectral presence of the works, suggesting that remembering the dead, attending to damaged environments, and acknowledging our responsibility to future generations are interconnected acts of care. Water imagery recurs alongside ghost-like figures as another spectral presence. It was water that finally extinguished the Knysna fire, becoming both an agent of restoration and a personal symbol of renewal. Yet water also embodies ecological precarity through floods, droughts and rising seas. As a liminal element, it dissolves boundaries between destruction and regeneration and evokes metaphors of cleansing.

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The Ghost works narrate absent species, damaged ecosystems and uncertain futures that continue to haunt the present.

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SOURCES CITED

Derrida, J. 1994. Spectres 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.