Inside. Outside. From each different world, you can access the other. It all happens at the window. Through treating the window as both a portal to the other world and a reflection of what’s within the reality of this world. This creates abstraction of reality as the window becomes the canvas rather than objects to look through.

Photography is often used to portray the truth because of its transparency. The same is true for windows (although windows are unlikely to be tampered with).  by using truth and reality, the viewer is urged to question both. In a time where outside movements were restricted and unlawful and indoor movements were frustrating and restrictive, viewers are left with trying to piece together the images and restore balance to these very separated worlds.

Some of these images relate to the dark and voyeuristic tendencies of photography by utilizing the mystery that the abstraction causes. Vague references to burglar bars also hint at this and causes an omnipresence of distractions, urges and realities. The viewer is left wondering who’s doing the watching. The artist? The camera? Them?

Exploring oil paint, the body of work expands the premise of the traditional medium and abstracts the rolls of medium, canvas and documentation (as seen in series 1). By highlighting the interaction of the paint blobs and its surroundings, the images become more abstract than documentary. They encourage the viewer to find shapes within its abstractions and more than that, fine fantasy scenes within the medium.

Through interrogating also, the idea of the object and sculptural medium, the second set of images refer to Brown’s (2001) ideas of thing theory (as seen in series 2). These objects, originally file organizers, loose their function and in the process of artistic intervention become ‘things’. The photographs in this case act more as documentation because of the abstraction caused by the intervention. These objects hint at more sinister activities, as they are more physically removed from their reality through biting, meting and gluing.

The photographic components of the project are also accompanied by an audio file where the audience is exposed to the creation process of the photographed objects. Through exploring the relationship of sounds without visual stimulation, the mind creates a new reality for these sounds.

This body of work aims to intrigue and confuse the viewer through removing, altering and juxtaposing new and old realities of the materials.

For this workshop I focussed on the family group dynamic during a time of confinement and restrictions. Through a drawing workshop, the groups could tap into their collective creativity and express their interactions with each other in real space through art. The outcome was three large scale sirgular drawings and a audio recording of each group's conversation. These drawings not only offered me a great amount of knowledge regarding group dynamics, but it also allowed the individuals personal growth as well.

The family groups consisted of 1. My parents, sibling and me, 2. My grandparents, father, sibling and me, 3. My grandpa (and his caretaker), mother, sibling and me. Participants were instructed to firstly reach as far as they can across the page using white oil pastels. Because of the nature of the materials each person’s creative space stayed intimate and uncertain until the marks are exposed with ink.

The results of this process is abstract and spontaneous mark-making (that resembles a planet or the moon) where the audience is able to engage with the group as a whole as well as the individuals within the group through their mark-making. The scale of the drawings allows the audience to move through the drawing as they take a closer look at the spontaneous marks, they can start to relate them through recorded auditory conversations. This also allows the viewer to have a personal connection to not only the drawings but the people behind them as well.

This process acts within the psycho-analytic practices of art therapy and because of its ability to open communication and interaction through art as a stimulus for both parts of the brain. The drawings were created in different spaces to add an environmental force into the final piece as well as in a circular format to create a physical closeness and remove any hierarchy to the format of the drawings.
Throughout the drawing process, participants commented on the idea of drawing as being childish and some influenced each other’s marks through key words connotated to easily reproducible images (e.g., a heart or a shrub). Through careful analysis as the process went on, I was able to reflect on many subtle details within gestures and marks, that expose the relationships that family members have and how we are not only within each other’s space, but also in our minds.

“Remediated painting is a process of becoming a painting, not an established state of being a painting” -Anne Petersen
This video project engages with painting through a transformative process and rethinking the landscapes’ role within a landscape painting.

Using soil from one specific environment, the video shows a slow process of sand falling through water and forming a new landscape within an object within the original landscape. The natural tones and fluid motions created by the earth and its interaction with time and gravity is contrasted with a digital translation of the same process. This process shows an analysis of the video through RGB and light tones (a lumetriscope). This view also allows the audience to look at nature through the eyes of technology.

By juxtaposing the natural with the digital, the viewer is confronted with machine translation and its relation to the natural world. This machine analysis of both the landscape and the movement within the sandscape painting creates hallucinogenic moving colours on screen. By playing both the digital analysis and the natural painting moving through time, the viewer is confronted with the question of which is more real. The machine approaches this translation with no relation to the physical world other than is existing. It does not know what the colours together would represent, neither that it is looking at a form of art or painting. It translates only the shifts in colour and light. The very strict yet unsteady image provided by the machine becomes overwhelming and the audience rely on the sounds and steadiness of the environment to soothe the eyes.

This project uses translation and new technology to contrast natural and ancient ways of painting. Through creating a video as a final statement, painting becomes firstly a moving image, secondly a recording of time and thirdly a translation through digital analysis. This prompts the viewer to question which representation is truer.

This installation explores ideas of temporality and the fluctuation of presence through the surfaces of an object. The work consists of 5 pieces assembled from shards of recycled class.

By exploring the materiality of glass, the sides become mixed up. The inside facing pane is exposed to the outside and the object becomes both dangerous, fragile and beautiful. When the viewer enters the realm of the artwork, they are not only passive in the act of viewing, but their image is subsumed within the pieces and duplicated over its surfaces. Installed outside and in a circular formation, the work reflects and acknowledges their own presence in the space through bending the images around it. This includes viewers, the environment and the other four objects. “Imager” reinforces the sense of image creation and now the divider becomes the image creator and more than that, an image recorder.

Without giving the viewer too much information on the object’s creation, their minds begin to wonder if something broke close by or if this piece is violent. This vaguely hints to the censorship and seeming transparency in South Africa. It also comments on how careful we should be to step around violence and what has the potential for it.

By destroying the object, we look through and creating a thing we look onto allows for stunning tension between the object and viewer. through image creation onto the multi-surfaced object, the mind, body, environment, object relationship can be investigated as a whole.

The body houses the being. Through our skin we greet our surroundings. The earth also has skin that is subject to change, climate, topography and time.

Through engaging the skin of both parties, an investigation developed through printmaking would begin. By utilizing soil as a wet material, paper could be stained, mono-printed onto by a secondary surface (acetate or glass), stamped onto with thicker, flat pieces of earth and body printed. This process of engaging with the soil directly unlike in previous projects, the skins touch, mix and influence each other through fine details and rough textures.

The natural resource used in this project gets its colour through being naturally high in iron oxides found in the east of Pretoria, South Africa. Physical engagement with the material allowed our skins to feel conjoined. Through exploring a lot of printing processes with the soil, I could express a side to my femininity that I am not used to. The natural materials on my skin reminded me of historic paintings of females within nature. By using body prints, the work becomes its own record of a landscape. A human female one as well as a natural one.

Printmaking becomes a way to combine both skins and landscapes and allows the viewer to experience the beauty of the soil if nothing else.