I am interested in the way that art-making functions to ground me in the world. As an immigrant, I spend time longing for a lost home and dreaming of reunions that will never come to pass. My art-making has become a way of processing this yearning and expressing it - sending it back, like an echo, into the world.
I practiced as a visual artist in Johannesburg, South Africa from the 1980s into the 2000s. I first taught drawing as a part-time lecturer at a local technical college and at two community colleges in Soweto, as well as working in inner-city community art projects (Spaza Art and The Artists Proof Studios). My commitment to teaching those who were denied any formal arts education under apartheid anchored me to my community and grounded my art-making in the society in which I lived. After the establishment of the new South African government in 1994, I engaged in culturally transformative activities in an evolving democratic South Africa that included contributing to curriculum development projects for a new educational system for the new South Africa.
My artwork was always closely knitted to my political identity as my own home functioned as a meeting place for cultural workers in art and music. My husband was a Mozambican musician who worked to support the anti-apartheid movement during the struggle and offered young musicians independent recording opportunities later when we set up our own art and music studios from our home in the inner city neighborhood of Troyeville, Johannesburg. In 2004 my husband was murdered in Johannesburg, and I relocated with my two young daughters to the peaceful neighboring country of Botswana. Living in Botswana provided me with the space and opportunity to create a new home away from the violence of South Africa, and rebuild my practice while teaching art at an International Baccalaureate high school. However, my art practice was disrupted and my subject matter and execution methods shifted dramatically. Botswana allowed me introspective time as I rebuilt my artmaking with a decidedly more inner-directed aspect and with the introduction of less conventional media and the introduction of abstract content. In 2009 I immigrated to the United States with my daughters, believing the move would offer them better educational opportunities. I have been teaching art in an International Baccalaureate high school where I have taken many opportunities to extend my art teaching skills and these experiences have also enhanced my practice. But as a studio artist I spent these years working in near isolation, with only rare opportunities for critiques, guidance or exchange with artists or academics.
As a mother of mixed-race daughters raised in exile, and as an art teacher of international students, I am constantly aware of the pain and confusion that expatriation causes people. I am interested in identifying the ways that art-making can benefit people as they struggle to find new homes, and new reasons for being, once they are uprooted from their original place. I hope my association with AIE will afford me opportunities to extend my art-making practice, learn from and exchange with artists and academics. I have many years of art teaching experience, including a deep passion for art history and a fixation with contemporary art. In my life experience as an artist and cultural worker I recognize the links between systemic racism and political power as they have impacted my own life and the lives of my mixed-race daughters, my family members, and my dearest friends, and I understand the significance of culture (and of art making more specifically), in the process of developing a more equitable society.

Technically, my work breaches printmaking, drawing and painting with some photography.
I had limited opportunities to exhibit my work in the 10 years of living in Atlanta and have mostly done so in non-commercial contexts such as museums (Rosa Parks Museum, Montgomery, Alabama) and university galleries (Georgia State University and Emory). I spent my vacation time, weekends and some weekday evenings making work. I urgently needed to have more time for my work and so in 2020 I moved to Tribeca, New York City and in 2021 to New Rochelle, NY.

The conceptual premise of my work is naturally in flux, but over the years I have returned repeatedly to consider ideas related to belonging, home and longing. I understand these ideas stem from my own biography but my work has also expanded beyond my own narrative to engage ideas of human connectedness and dependency more broadly. Exploring nostalgia and the romance of longing, I have probed human links to nature and researched ideas relating to human alienation from nature. The essence of this state of alienation seems to me to reside in the concept of Culture: As we distance ourselves from nature through manipulating nature and making human environments and objects (ironically like the art objects I make to explore the very idea), we find ourselves suspended between our origins as physical creatures and our preoccupation with thought, loneliness and mortality. Over time I have developed a personal set of symbols to codify these ideas. The simple bowl form has become a shorthand sign representing human culture that I employ to both celebrate and critique ‘making’ and ‘cultural production’. I hope that there is a social contribution of my artmaking practice which resides in supporting approaches to understanding the role of artmaking in people suffering from loss of home and from alienation.

I am eager to develop new ideas and skills and enthusiastic about the community artists at AIE.