Rosary, 2024

Rosary proposes a comparison between ancient thoughts and myths surrounding the female form with current ideas around perception/deception of women’s bodies in much of contemporary society.

Prayer beads, usually strung together and named differently across cultures, have similar meanings. They represent a re-centering act, a connection point to that which is larger, greater, wiser than humanity and a place for deep reverence.

The oversized necklace/prayer piece invites contemplation and a meditation separate to that of mass media and contemporary control of how the female body is seen.

Each female figure, created as beads in Rosary, are either imagined or a re-interpreted studies of various fertility figurines found in Europe and Africa. They bring the diverse feminine forms into tactile and visual immediacy for today’s viewer especially vivid in its oversized scale.

Its continuous circular form could act as a reconnector to the body in contemporary times. A nuanced take on body positivity and empowerment.

Safe Spaces, 2023

I’m interested in how events shape who we are and how we behave. This, in turn, shapes our society, one riddled with violence and loneliness.

In this diptych (from the body of work Safe Spaces, 2023), I draw from psychology and anthropology in an interdisciplinary portrait (photograph and handcrafted book) that focuses on a young woman just passing the cusp of adolescence into adulthood.

The book component shares her intimate story. The portrait is a visual translation of its contents.

In a recorded and transcribed interview, she told me about herself in a collaborative effort to “distil” her experienced identity. The aim of this process was to create a channel through which the subject and I could together, develop a photographic portrait ‘brief’.

My role: to be a medium, to be the translator.

The camera’s role: to be the bridge to you, the viewer. The machine (and its operator) became a compassionate player, not a “taker”; not a “shooter”. The portrait is about identity; one’s private internal world and the one we-consciously or not – choose to portray to the ‘other’. It speaks of our vulnerability, the need for places of refuge and the human need for community.

We have evidence of arts ability to mobilise audiences if we look at the role theology has served for hundreds of years.

We can do this again for contemporary needs by using it as a mechanism for empathy which believe is necessary for peace.

Lynette Reclining, 45 Cuts, 45 Bows, 2023

Lynette Bester and my joined works are portraits/self-portraits of Lynette and her lived experiences.

In this piece we worked with a roadside-dumped couch. This foundation was the basis for an odalisque nude, the spectated female form.

The discarded couch was then re-worked, stripped to its own nakedness, wood, screws, springs, nothing soft left.

After many traumatically experienced relationships and lost loves (45 to count) Lynette sawed the number of cuts into the armature but then, in reference to Manet’s Olympia, she mends each cut with black ribbons and bows. A considered meditation on past judgement and hurt.

The final work, couch against a wall with the photograph hung above it, references a private/public living space, inner trauma and resilience on display.

The sculptural component now embodies her. The cuts and bows a direct infliction.
Self-love is nurtured in the photographic component. Trauma and resilience co-exist as we explore portraiture free of simplified tropes.

Women Woven Together, 2024

In Women Woven Together, Cape Town artist Leah Rachel Hawker uses traditional women’s handicrafts to create a series of fine art pieces that depict and celebrate iconic South African women.

Each of the ten tapestries is crafted using a collage of historical imagery, meaningful symbols, and patterns that directly reference the lives of the women portrayed. The icons are adorned with radiant elements – halo, aura, crown, or wings – symbolizing their lifetime achievements.

The collection explores themes of women’s power, ‘Womandla’, compassion, courage, struggle, and activism, all of which serve as common threads connecting the ten women.

Hawker employed 20 women from diverse cultural backgrounds and ages, many of whom had no other source of income at the time. She trained the group in the basics of embroidery and beading. Over a period of three months, the artist and the women worked side-by-side to create and embellish the tapestries.

Through this collaborative process, a sense of community, creativity, and empowerment was fostered.

Invocations, 2025

Invocations is made up of photographs, collaged Polaroids, talismans, amulets and a large, hand-constructed, suspended headdress under which viewers can stand.

The body of work, produced on residency in the folklore-rich Rhodope Mountains in Southern Bulgaria, focused on the Samodiva myth, sacred rituals and the annual women’s fertility ceremony of Enyovden over the sunset and sunrise of summer solstice.

The sculptural headdress is a re-interpretation of age-old ceremonial women’s attire. This piece invites viewers into a contemporary ritual where, after documenting themselves ‘adorned’ by it, they may share themselves re-imagined on public, social platforms. This act, as well as the remaining body of works, aims to re-ignite the old and fast fading women’s wisdoms by bringing them forward into contemporary view.

Polaroid Women, 2014 – 2026

I investigate internal femininity in places of refuge and vulnerability. The environments are nature made, not manmade. Figures move, dream and simply ‘be’ in places that could be anywhere, nowhere. They are polar to contemporary mass media lives filled with so much fear and violence.

The body of work is large-scale at over 400 images now. All the photographs are shot on Polaroid. The making of every image is instant and touchable.

The Polaroid formats’ materiality, and its porthole-like borders, add to the images untroubled, balmy nostalgia for unknown and safe spaces.

Eden (collage of found lithograph and analogue nudes from my series Polaroid Women), 2022

In 2021 piles of vintage lithographs, all by the old South African master painters, were found in the capital’s main archives. The surprising find led to the works being distributed to artists across the country to re-work and re-imagine for a group show at the prestigious Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees.

Just like the Gerhard Beukes’ landscapes, characterised by a romantic vision of pure nature, so are the women that I have inserted into them. The women have been extricated from a series of original Polaroids shot over 21 years (the body of work Polaroid Women). They too exist in their own nondescript nature space, a safe place in the world, a place of solace. The women now visit Beukes’ space, the same dream space from which they come.

Bernadette, 2020

Bernadette after a bath comes from a body of work which is composed of a series of cinematic, yet un-choreographed portraits that tell the story of Bernadette, in an intimate dance of unexpected exhibitionism and voyeurism.

Bernadette’s body is fragile & awkward due to her long struggle with illness; it bares scars of life’s battering disproportionate to her young age. In contrast with this a strength & confidence unfolds before the camera, where the act of documenting serves as an intermediate for healing.

The low-lit images genuinely gritty & truthful, even more so when seen printed near life-size: un-cropped, unedited. She has not been manipulated (during the documentation process and the post documentation process). The images embrace a realism that confronts the beauty industry and, as women, our expectations of self and of others. Perhaps Bernadette, in being a portrait series is in fact a photographic essay of contemporary desire, and acknowledgment of the existence of an authentic self.

Regarding the Pain of Others: a Contemporary Pietà

I’m interested in how the events that make up individual lives shape who we are and how we behave. This, in turn, shapes our society, one riddled with violence, grief and loneliness.

With an intertextual reference to Michelangelo’s Pieta, this contemporary portrait of mother and child is similarly filled with both a mothers tender love and pathos.

This portrait speaks about the often invisible or hidden trauma we survive daily, the precariousness of life and the grace with which we carry and use this knowledge throughout our lives.

Each day the lotto wheel of life spins. Much of it is measured out and cut by unseen forces: a new life is born, natural disaster destroys, the triumph of a positive prognosis, genocide begins anew, a good harvest ripens…

In the instance of this portrait, Maximo is held by his mother Victoria, he is the ‘1’ in the ‘100,000’ born with a smooth brain: a very rare and terminal illness. Victoria lives with his inevitable death on a moment by moment basis. The pair represent an uncomfortable reminder of the frailty of our lives and the value of empathy towards those around us.