PREVIOUS COLLAGE WORK

I was born and brought up in South Africa, and my work grows out of that experience of living on a continent where I always felt both enchanted and slightly out of place. The recurring figure of a European woman placed in an African environment, often alongside animals like the zebra and giraffe, allowed me to explore that tension between belonging and estrangement; elements that don’t quite fit together but coexist in my inner landscape.

I have been deeply influenced by women surrealists: Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Remedios Varo, and Leonor Fini, who opened a space where the unconscious, the mythical, and the feminine could reshape reality beyond conventional narratives of art history. Collage became my language almost by accident during my studies of Art and Design at the Port Elizabeth Technikon, in South Africa, when a frustrating cityscape assignment turned into an experiment of cutting, photocopying, and reassembling images until a new, imagined cityscape appeared.

Working with printed magazines connected me to a long tradition of print in modern and contemporary art, even as that material was disappearing from everyday life. I see my collages as both personal mythologies and small archival gestures representing the tactile world I grew up in, while asking how I could translate identity, memory, and place. Over the years, my work has been exhibited widely both in South Africa, Holland, Germany and Switzerland, with one collage work entering the collection of the King’s palace in Swaziland, and others in private collections, with an exhibition at the Gate Foundation in Amsterdam which affirmed my journey of turning dislocation into a visual language.