This piece was created for a solo exhibition titled One Sunday afternoon at Tamasa Gallery, Durban, in 2024.
Artist statement:
My work draws inspiration from the diverse landscapes of Durban, South Africa, engaging with the tradition of landscape paintings while reinterpreting it through a contemporary lens. By deconstructing these environments into what I consider their basic elements— the physical, the visceral, the sensorial, and the human interaction. I explore what truly constitutes a landscape.
Historically, South African artists like Jacob Pierneef and Maggie Laubser preserved these scenes through oil paintings. Today, anyone can, and inevitably will, capture a landscape with a phone camera, because we are inherently drawn to the grandeur, stillness, lushness, and beauty, and feel the need to hold onto the moment, yet landscape painting has fallen out of favour in contemporary art. This led me to question what constitutes a landscape and why do we feel the need to capture its splendour.
Rather than simply documenting a scene, I attempt to break down landscapes into colour, texture, and movement, physically tearing apart and reassembling paintings into often abstracted, but highly tactile works. These fragments attempt to mirror the way we experience and remember landscapes: fleeting, layered, and impressionable.
Through this approach, I invite viewers to rethink their connection with nature, considering how memory and emotion shape our understanding of the world around us.
