CURRENT WORK 2020-2026

I am a South African artist and live in Switzerland. I create work that explores the intricate interconnections between human experience and the plant world. My practice has developed through drawing, painting and collage. The medium of my current work is drawing with pencil crayons and focuses on the unseen networks that sustain life. It explores our entanglement with nature and the potency of invisible spaces: the unseen forces, systems, and rhythms that shape perception and our coexistence.

However, nothing was more instrumental to my work than the lockdown of 2020 and its subsequent impact. As Covid-19 spread fear and infection around the world, a beautiful Spring was pulsing life with bird song through the forests around Basel. We had all abruptly fallen silent. This moment has been eloquently described by Stevan Lovatt in Birdsong in a Time of Silence, where he recounts how seismologists recorded a measurable decline in the Earth’s vibrations as industrial noise temporarily ceased. For a brief interval, the planet seemed to listen to itself.

Spending time in the forests during the lockdowns and listening to the bird songs compelled me to start drawing and painting again. I was limited by the space of my apartment and initially yearned for the beautiful atelier that I once had in Zurich, in what now seemed to be another life.  So, I started with what I had available, which was a large roll of paper, crayons, some old acrylic paints and my narrow balcony.
These constraints proved generative. The resulting works occupy a space between observation and invention, neither botanical illustration nor abstraction, and mark the beginning of an ongoing inquiry into imagined ecologies.

Central to my recent practice, particularly my large-format drawings of imagined plant forms, is the concept of interconnection. I am interested in systems that operate beneath the visible surface: root networks, mycelial structures, acoustic and energetic fields, and the social and ecological bonds that sustain life. Like plants that depend on complex underground exchanges, so do we as humans collaborate and focus on a shared purpose.

Three artists who inspire me:

A key conceptual influence is the Voynich Manuscript, the enigmatic fifteenth-century codex whose illustrated plants, astrological diagrams, and speculative scientific imagery continue to resist interpretation. Encountering the manuscript during the pandemic profoundly affected my thinking. Its refusal of fixed meaning and its hybrid language, at once scientific, mystical, and poetic, resonated with my own approach. Like the Voynich plants, my forms suggest knowledge without explanation, inviting viewers into a space of uncertainty, intuition, and imaginative projection.

I am also informed by contemporary practices that investigate systems beyond human perception. Libby Heaney’s work, which entwines quantum computing with digital and material processes, is particularly significant. Her exploration of entanglement, across virtual and physical realms, body and machine, past and future, parallels my interest in non-linear systems and interconnected realities. While my practice remains analogue, it shares with Heaney a concern for how unseen structures govern experience.

Another inspiring artist is Miguel Chevalier, whose generative environments, especially his Fractal Flowers, further inform my thinking. His endlessly evolving digital gardens address nature as a dynamic, algorithmic process, raising questions about growth, mutation, and artificial reproduction. On a poetic level, his work reflects on ecological transformation in an age of technological intervention, a concern that aligns with my own exploration of imagined botanical forms as speculative futures rather than nostalgic returns to nature.

Ultimately, my work is a meditation on quiet transformation, on listening, connecting, and restoring our relationship with the living world. I try to give form to what cannot be seen but continuously binds us together: the invisible spaces that nourish all existence.

“I hear the roots whisper” 150 x 250 cm , (59 x 98 ins) , Coloured pencil on paper, 2024