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,…
These teabag art quilts do more than form a landscape. They become a part of the landscape. The art quilts pulsate with energy and light; the kinaesthetic quality intensifies when the wind softly blows on them, and the light plays…
The three winter quilts — June, July, August — are made to be read together as a single winter landscape and a single sentence. Be Still. And Know. I Am. It is a verse from Psalm 46, and it is…
We might not have a harsh white, snowy winter in Eswatini, but nevertheless spring arrives in a vibrant eruption. Jacaranda, bougainvillea, poppies, daisies…flowers with the ambivalence of being both beautiful yet an invasive, non-endemic species. When my family takes time…
I have been watching my very indepedent daughter walk away her whole life. Up the path to nursery school in Gobabis, small legs going faster than I expected. Into classrooms, friendships, experiences. It’s pride laced with something that has no…
Most of my twelve teabag art quilts hold their shape. They are colourwash impressions — warm, pixelated, luminous when backlit. But November is different. It is dark. Storm-coloured. A brewing sky, heavy with what is coming or what has already…
Every December, my family and I make the same journey. It’s the great ‘trek’ down to the coast. It takes two days of driving to get from Eswatini to Stilbaai, a small coastal town in the Western Cape. Two days…