We cuddle on the ‘vetsak’ Lisha gifted me to celebrate the ‘you made it’-point of my long, arduous, time-consuming Master’s. Time to lie back and enjoy life some! Well, Lisha, I thoroughly enjoy life, particularly when you are home. Today,…
November 2025. Johannesburg, South Africa. Holy Trinity Catholic Church sits quietly at the edge of one of the city’s loudest neighbourhoods — a sanctuary tucked between the University of the Witwatersrand and the noise and energy of inner-city Joburg, its…
July 2026. Mbabane, Eswatini. If Holy Trinity was where the twelve quilts found their sacred space, Waterford Kamhlaba was where they came home. The exhibition at Waterford in 2026 carried a particular weight that no other venue could have given…
Where do I belong? Where are my roots? Is my heart divided, or has it just grown bigger? Isabel Allende raises these questions in the preface to her novel A Long Petal of the Sea, and they are questions I…
During the 2023 Annual Visual Arts Exhibition at Waterford Kamhlaba, I spread a large cotton sheet on a table in the exhibition space. Beside it I placed a box of coloured teabags. And then I stepped back. A handwritten invitation…
I was attending an open studio session with my postgraduate colleagues at the Wits School of Arts in 2024. Someone — not addressing me directly, but in my presence — said: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one…
The quilt is different from all the others. Where the colourwash quilts move and pulse with landscape impressions — teabags arranged into mountains, oceans, gardens, skies — March is still. Calm and circular. Concentric rings of natural teabags arranged from…
Sunnyside is a guest farm near Golden Gate in the Free State, tucked into the foothills of the Drakensberg where the mountains have mystical names: Angel’s Wing, Snow Hill, Face Rock (spot it in the art quilt!). My father-in-law first…
May: Inkhwekhweti: Malolotja was the first of the twelve art quilts I made. In it, I recall the time when we were moving from Namibia to Zambia. While passing through Eswatini en route north, I looked over Malolotja Game Reserve…
In the middle of the year, after much emotion and turmoil, I take a deep breath on my rock overlooking Nyonyane and remind myself: be still. It’s a time to reground myself and keep going. In The Atlas of Emotion,…