For many years my art making took place on the margins of my corporate career. In 2012, I decided to concentrate on my art practice. To be closer to natural environs I love, I relocated from Johannesburg to the Western Cape.

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Karin Daymond and Ricky Burnett have mentored my painting practice over many years. I work mainly with oil on canvas (I had remarkable teachers and mentors in Karin Daymond and Ricky Burnett). Printmaking came into the mix through workshops at The Artists’ Press in 2013, the Sharon Sampson Studio in 2014/5 and, in 2019, an internship at Warren Editions.

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In 2021 I completed a postgraduate diploma in fine art (with distinction) at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, working in the fragile medium of porcelain paper clay. I continue to work with elements of fragility and memory in new works.

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I have paintings and prints in private international and local collections as well as in South African corporate collections, including Spier Arts Trust and the University of Cape Town’s  Works of Art Collection.

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​MY CREATIVE PRACTICE touches on my local environs and internal landscapes, in an attempt to explore and transform my emotional and physical experiences into a visual language. By the act of making, my work becomes a metaphor for the natural world and gestures towards a vital essence within it that connects human and non-human being. It draws attention to the way the beauty, depth and intelligence of the natural world, while not fully understood, has a profound impact on the human psyche.​ After all, humans are ‘of’ nature too.

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Immersing myself in the natural world brings me into the present moment: in watching a body of water, I become one with it, absorbed into its movement and pattern; the beauty of a dead seed head makes me look at and appreciate its remarkable structure; a stand of grasses undulating in the wind makes me want to ripple and flow with it, becoming aware of an underlying rhythm that riffles through my mind and body and reconnects me with that environment. The process becomes meditative, and curative – a rekindling of something lost.​

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Like the play of light and shadow, this heightened consciousness of presence is therefore also always a consciousness of absence. My art is an attempt to offer a glimpse of these sublime and ephemeral internal and external landscapes.

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