• Your work fits neatly into the art movement of Neo-Expressionism, spearheaded by artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat. It is a late modernist and early post-modernist movement that emerged roughly in the 1970s. I have two questions in relation to this.
     

    • Q: Would you say that you deliberately choose to create artwork aligned with this movement?

     

    A: I think my inspiration started here at home before I knew about Basquiat and Neo-Expressionism. The artists in my generation that were influential were one of the leading artists in South Africa by the name of Nhlanhla Xaba, he's late, and a recent artist who is still alive, by the name of Kay Hassan. They were influenced by political movements and the transition from where South Africa was and what South Africa is today.
     
    I think in picking up Basquiat, it was about wanting information, understanding where you're heading and finding new possibilities. In the early 90s, I was really inspired by his sort of thinking process around abstraction. Basquiat was engaging in society to find a language that could deal with what was happening during the 80s in the United States - particularly if we think about how he depicted  racism and what African Americans were experiencing at the time. 
     

    • Q: What are your thoughts on the Neo-Expressionist art movement?

     
    A: The Neo-Expressionist movement, I think from an intellectual understanding, was about how art was viewed in terms of distorting what an image is or representation is, be it internally and externally. It was thinking of subject matter that sort of translated into the obstruction of understanding, in terms of how you begin to depict distortion. In some sense, that was a real distortion of trying to bring the depth of intellectualizing the process of image making, and how that somehow evolved into thought and writing.
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  • Q: Music plays an essential part in the creation of your artworks. You actually begin creating your artwork when you listen to music. Why is music such an inspiration for you?
     
    A: Music has an element of memory, particularly how we've been brought up as children during the early age of apartheid. To our parents, music was a very symbolic thing to listen to, especially listening to jazz. For me, it was jazz that sort of brought an understanding of calmness, and elements of engagement and reflection. I think when it comes to my image-making, it sort of positions me to go deeper with my practice, because it creates those spaces of trance that enable you to go deeper into self. I think music is a way of evoking those…I don't want to use the word ‘dangerous’, but rather ‘ghost thoughts’ that translate into harmony and peace. 
     
    Music  sharpened my language in terms of how I visually speak about unspoken things I was scared to speak about. It is essentially about engaging with how you feel and understanding how you position your feelings into what you're constructing. There is conscious decision-making in finding a way to talk about what's happening within you and putting it in a form for your audience to interpret.
     
    I think my abstract is sort of intertwined with the music that I play, that is sort of in a form of improvised. The way of playing is an expression of feeling. It's the same with when I make abstract art, it's more of unpacking feelings that are complex, that are darkness. So all these elements come together into a form of  sound and image-making.
     
    Q: You trained in art therapy at The Art Therapy Centre in Johannesburg and that you have guided individuals who have been sexually assaulted, abused and living with HIV. In what way is art therapeutic and how can art assist individuals contending with various forms of abuse?
     
    A: We are living in a very conflicted world. There’s the pandemic of HIV/AIDS, women abuse, children abuse, and many more issues that have an overwhelming impact on society. When I was training, I found that art inspires individuals who have endured trauma to communicate. Material allows a safe space to talk about what you made and why you made it. It becomes really personal because it evokes a lot of emotions, and it is a past that a person has been given access to. Art plays a very significant role in unpacking those possibilities and facilitating the responsibilities of the psychologist, the drama therapist, the art therapist. 
     
    Q: Your work is significantly abstract – how do you feel abstract works relate to scale?

    A: I think everything that you do, it goes with experience. To me, making a conscious-decision to work in a huge format, it's actually not an easy thing, it’s very scary. You really have to be brave in projecting who you are and to deal with some unconscious and conscious things that you have never really spoken about to people. I think abstract is a way of tapping into the unknown, to want to create things that are real. 

  • Q:  You create something new with that which is old, broken, discarded, and dismissed. Please elaborate on this. 
     
    A: Some of the elements you just described to me, I think, have to do with how I grew up as a child, in different stages of where I was and where I was going. It was using an intellectual way of describing that ‘this is me’ - that I am naked, however I cannot reveal my nakedness to you, that I can only be naked with paint, with light, and with sound. It is an abstract way of thinking about things and really elaborating on where I come from. People have this perception that when you're an artist, you're a very happy person, so you are making art that people connect with what has been made. But I think what is not said is that certain things are really personal for individuals and so there is a feeling of not wanting to disclose the difficult experiences in your current life or in your past. In my art I do not say this directly, but I am alluding to it - which is that I am proposing that the audience have an engagement with who I am. In doing so, I understand that I'm vulnerable and I want to be part of my vulnerability to create safe spaces to question if it is safe enough to talk about insecurities and fears. 
     
    Q:  Your work explores the continuity of the creative process. Why explore the process and not the final creative output? 
     
    A: I'm exploring the process because I feel that in anything that people do, whether it's writing, painting, dancing, playing music, it becomes a process. It doesn't become an outcome. By saying this, you will  never give yourself a deadline, because sometimes a painting or a piece of music that you're trying to establish takes charge of you and guides you as to how it has to go. It is a process of experimentation. A painting, for me, guides you into different elements of discovering your artistic technique, of how a painting takes its own charge, and how a piece changes in structure. That, for me, is a really exciting moment, because if I allow myself not to direct what I'm doing, I begin to see. Most of the paintings that I've done, I've done in different periods. Some I've spent like two years, while others three years. Some I only spend a period of two weeks or a day, so it depends. I think that for me, it's really accessing the inner self, the inner soul. 
     
    I think there's one thing that I always say when I work with young people and it is that life is all about having courage. You cannot think of an end product, you have to think of what you are doing. When you do something you may get lost in it and it means that you must get deeper into it. It wants you to write more about what you go through. It tells you that you need to do more research on what you're trying to say to yourself and how you have to present that to the world. 
     
    Q:  Your new work explores that which is dark, hidden, unseen, that which you call “the shadows.” Why depict darkness and the unseen, as opposed to that which is born from light?
     
    A: Interesting question. We struggle with this as human beings and I think that the concept or the  theme of ‘light and shadow’ emerged in my work in 2019 when I had my first solo exhibition at Candice Berman Gallery. My exhibition was based on that title you just elaborated on and I incorporated that after thinking quite carefully about performance. It was sort of translating  light(ness) and how it is really intertwined with darkness and the shadow of our lives. The question then was about how one starts to address all this darkness, the possibilities of the shadows and what they mean to us. So my pieces were reflecting the sort of the impact of those images that were translating the layering of color, while at the same time showing conflict, chaos alongside peace, love, pleasure, and happiness. 
  • Q: Just to reference one of your paintings titled “You Are Not Your Thoughts”. This particular artwork gives the impression of a collage with quite a bit of detail, as it features images of watches, records, music sheets, newspaper articles, various texts, and even artworks by other artists. What is the significance of incorporating these elements in your work?  
     
    A: When I go back and think about who I am - my identity, what inspires me, the democratic transition in South Africa - all of that is about figuring out what is meaningful for me as an individual, as an artist. I think for me, translating an image and creating a symbolic way of working, is a question of trying to find who I am and where I'm going. In the process of this translation there has been a lot of inspiration in finding myself, that formed part of my development as a young artist, and then as a professional artist today.