“Every landscape is a condition of the spirit”. Henri Frederic Amiel

Living in the Karoo landscape, I often feel like the dry bushes myself, spreading across the landscape, living in the olive trees, extending over the mountains with the clouds, flirting with the hues of light in the clouds’ cheeks. I feel like the nocturnal aardvark, porcupines, kudus, and leopards that come and go in the procession of the seasonal curtains of rain, wind, and snow.

We are “made of the earth”. No heart, whether human or of the earth, escapes the plunder of loss – all love presupposes it. With “love”, I mean the innumerable confidences between humans and the human-earth relationship.…woven through the senses, sometimes trembling, because of droughts, famine, fire, and death. When this happens, we grieve, whether it is a loss of feelings or atoms. We learn to walk out of the embers when we bear and forebear whatever unfolds, inhaling deeply from the magnetic centre of the planet that is our being.

It is in this context that I create and photograph landscapes – the textures of dead leaves, the bark in nooks and crevasses of trees, the centre of tiny wildflowers – and create textures on rice paper with salt, water and fire – because textures evoke feeling, the fleeting intricacies of strands of life intertwining and disentangling in wondrous and miraculous ways – weaving and unravelling patterns, disorderly around “a secret order”. (Carl Jung)

 Tolkien says, “Still round the corner, there may wait for a new road or a secret gate”.