‘I knew when I had looked for a long time that I had hardly begun to see’ ‘The eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it had already seen.’

Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

The starting place for my work remains grounded in looking, an experience of looking that carries a sense of being present, of discovery, of intense lucidity and of being held in a state of wonder. Through this kind of active looking, the particular and specific are revealed with intricacy, complexity, brilliant clarity, and luminous simplicity. Drawing and Painting in this context are a medium for experiencing the world directly, in a way that requires patient inquiry, a gradual shedding of preconceptions and the emerging of a new sense of the world, as though seen for the first time.

The world I grew up in was charged and still shaped by the tensions of and the very recent liberation from colonial rule, a world where multiple cultures jostled and braided together. These tensions and the combining and overlaying of separate strands are reflected in my world and work, with distinct and almost contradictory ways of living, being and of making, coexisting equally and simultaneously.