She is a line drawing, a character that emerged when I was training in animation storyboarding at the School of visual arts in New York. She is a normal female going about her business. The dog is Love/ Eros and is unbounded. He emerged when She started doing couples yoga. The series of mugs are them, a normal, run-of-the-mill couple trying this out.
Shortly before sunrise, the spirits of the night dance their last dance, a site specific illustration and video Installation.
The three part work, I made for Broken Vessels at Broken Vessels at Interface Inagh Galway Ireland, refers to the phrase “Entre Chein et Loup” (between the dog and wolf) – where there is a shift of consciousness between the real and the imagined.
Displaced by current circumstances I viewed the land and site through a telephone camera, emailed visual data and instructions for the work to be made remotely. It was a thrilling experience to have to work with this limitation as I am fascinated by how information moves and what effect this has on our consciousness.
Part 1 is a QR code that will direct you to a video piece. The video is of a Google Virtual Reality Golden Eagle hovering, surveying the hatchery and water towers. Watching it and listening to the sound on your device you become a remote of the bird cries. Both the bird and the sound are simulacra drawn from an archive.
Part 2 is a vanishing image of a raptor that is printed onto reams of paper with one cartridge of ink until the ink runs out. It is exhibited on pine shelves, which point to the forested area on the site.
Part 3 is a weathering composite image of illustrations of the Golden Eagle pasted onto the derelict shipping container in a forested area as you enter the property.
In 2018 at the Gallerie Exterior at Cité des Arts. Sam Tshabalala and I were in conversation for a week developing a portrait of him as an artist who was in exile from South Africa. We danced and sang together and spoke though our collective histories as South African Artists and the children of policemen. We opened our work space to the public to show what we have developed and our questions around how to shift the paradigm of portraiture and developing a more reciprocal relationship.
2018 I was awarded residency at the Cité des Arts Paris, where I had a studio next to Jakob Warmenbol rehearsing jazz percussion. Unbeknownst to him I started to draw to his music and made line drawings on panels. I was mapping the music.
I made a postcard on watercolour paper and began posting my drawings from the atelier to my friends. Simultaneously I was making a series of raptors which I was running through multiple printers. I was playing with the random ad hoc quality and outcome of old obsolete printers with troublesome heads and nozzles. I began joining the two works, using the line as a flight pattern and the music as a prompt.
Similarly to the clouds. The images were printed onto desktop paper and were put on the wall left to age. It was at this time that one of my works on newsprint were disqualified from an auction due the unstable archival quality of newsprint. This was ironic to me as I have an old newspaper article from the 1800s and it is a beautiful collectable item. I intentionally left the birds to age and change as paper is organic and will always shift. Ironically these works were thrown away by a gallery attendant and are no longer in existance.