Completing my Masters of arts in Public Spheres at EDHEA, this body of work took shape alongside a thesis which embodied the quest to produce a memoir for the conclusion of the degree. Attempting to distil my story proved weak against the force of needing to respond to the context I found myself in. Negotiating the spectacle of Third wWorld Pain in a First World Terrain, I could not reinstate a sense of separation between them.

Unknown. Liquid amber abscissions sculpture. Dimensions variable. Sierre. 2023

I’ve collected abscissions from a Liquid-Amber tree located outside my atelier over the course of two years. I appropriate them by calling them thoughts. The abscissions representing material reality of something intangible.

I used gestural activations to indicate the ephemeral nature of change and its affects. By sorting through the collection of the abscissions into piles, there was a residue of tiny seeds that were left on the floor. The shape of the abscissions combed lines, remnants of movement, and a map of sort.
A method of quantification was used, by counting them and adding chalk lines to the walls around them during the performative act. The chalk lines acted as unnoticed work, when the gesture was done, the labour felt forgotten, and I was aiming to draw the connections between labour, coding and nature.

More than anything, quantification was a pointless act in the catastrophe of organisation, one that brought meaningful contemplations about our illusion of control and its very real affect on material realities. All this nagging to be noted in a Swiss context.

It was an intense meditation. To question, through the work, challenges caused by overconsumption, surplus and overloads. While considering personal underlying questions of displacement, positioning and embodied knowledge.

There included a Augmented reality component of the work. an image that when accessed via the mobile phone, could move and speak on the digital layer of reality. Only a QR code was placed to invite audiences. A strategy in questioning accessibilities and even audience engagement.

Situated in the ultra-globalised world that operates between various realities, including the material ecosystems, the industrious politics and the digital landscapes, I was provoking an avalanche of sorts.

This work was produced during the Covid 19 lockdown. Presented in a solo exhibition as part of the completion of my BAFA at WITS, the project was a reflection of an incubator. A makeshift home studio, online lectures, restricted movement and a global response to a pandemic, developed a way of looking that only contemplation in solitude can provide.

Phonebooks. A relic of sorts, torn up into a water bath, with texts like Walter Mignolos’ the darker side of the renaissance and maps tracing my mixed lineage. All accumulations I had grown weary of, with enough time to declutter.

Reflections were taking place,

in the confinement of a pandemic lockdown,

about movement.

Remarkably

departing from a series of line drawings where an ant crossed a page with my pen behind it…. Mostly. I also placed the pen in front of, on the side of the insect. Starting off in playfulness, then fascination and then arrogant boredom, until 7 drawings sparked a moral question. Of power, map making and control.

What logically followed. (beyond the exhaustion, frustration, feelings of understanding nothing and so much).

I had made a book with seeds embedded into the paper. So a new story could grow from it. I wrote in the book. Wondering if the words would effect the roots once I planted it.

Determined to give the book ideal conditions for growth, I learned about nitrogen, as an accelerant to germination. Tea leaves contain this element so I set off on collecting them. In a performative effort I emptied a full dustbin bag of teabags. On footage of 5 hours condensed into 12 minutes, the act was repetitive and meditative as I counted the amount of bags it would take to fill a 15l jar.

It often is true for me, how initial impressions or intentions surprise me.

As If I am following the work, without much control.

Emerging from a ritual, I looked at the empty bags strewn on the floor around me.

They were so beautiful

and thought of bare skin, laying bare, naked, vulnerable, most delicate

and yet the skin as a fierce layer of protection just like the bags itself.

Performative interventions at the exhibition of this work included intimate audiences and readings from the text of the book. An intensity in the atmosphere given the distance created by fear of contagion.

The body holds lines. Unlike the kind the hands make. Much like the growing things beyond the grasp.

وَلَقَدۡ خَلَقۡنَا ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ وَنَعۡلَمُ مَا تُوَسۡوِسُ بِهِۦ نَفۡسُهُۥۖ وَنَحۡنُ أَقْرَبُ إِلَيْهِ مِنۡ حَبۡلِ ٱلۡوَرِيدِ

Surah Qaf, verse 16 Qur’an

"Indeed, We created humankind and We know what their souls whisper to them, and We are closer to them than their jugular vein”

in the making.

My work is always seemingly arbitrary until connections show up later. It seems as though a world is being built and narratives from this world in which it exists are coded.

The forms come together as a landscape, a language of gesture appears, dictating a meaning on which this world operates.

I am writing short stories using these codes. The first short story, of which is grounded in my birthland, South Africa. The second in Switzerland and the third...

its not all there yet.so.

in the making.