After living in the bushveld in world’s third largest canyon for ten years, I travelled north to Europe in late 2022 to explore the places my ancestors come from, and to experience the world outside my South African experience.
My practice is informed by wilderness, by nature and the contrasts and contradictions I find in contemporary society and how nature adapts to humanity’s rapaciousness.
I was born outside Johannesburg in the East Rand amidst airports, suburbs, shopping malls and gold mines. I am a defender of wilderness and the tenderness of humanity. I work with rural women, running business development, permaculture and self defence training programs, and with people around the world who seek authenticity and peace, when I’m not making art.
After a decade of working in the film industry in the 1990s, I fled north to the Zambian wilds and then moved to Australia where I lived for twelve years, immersed in the work and study of healing trauma. I returned to South Africa in 2012 to work at a lion conservancy and started a non-profit organisation called Zingela Ulwazi Trust in 2014.
South Africa runs deep through my bones and being. I grew up in suburban Gauteng and attended UCT in the early 1990s during the transition to democracy. I worked with a variety of international filmmakers covering this progression, and have been deeply involved in human and environmental rights, dignity and justice work.
The ancient red earth of my recent home in the canyon, the wild creatures and vegetation of the bush provided me a base camp for multi-dimensional exploration, meditation, contemplative practice and general wilderness immersion, which supported and held my work in terrifically complex contemporary South Africa. I exhale in Europe as I locate myself in the strangeness of these bounteous, stable and fractured places.
After a lifetime of hard work, I am in love with my art practice, mostly embroidering, drawing and painting. Each of these works that you see on the following pages takes 2+ months to make.