Breath Sculptures
2018
Conveying ideas of fragility and fallibility, these four ‘breath sculptures’ were made by the five individual breaths of a group of children who suffer from asthma: Thaakira Salie (age 8), Ziyaad Small (age 10), Blake Leppan (age 9) and Jessie Allot (age 11).
Working in collaboration with the Allergy Foundation of South Africa and Andre de Jager, UCT’s resident glass blower in the Department of Chemistry, I facilitated a workshop in which the children were taught the practice of blowing glass and produced their own sculptures through breathing into the molten glass. The breath sculptures made by these children were far removed from the functional bespoke glassware usually produced in the workshop for experiments in Chemistry as well as for those conducted in Physics and Chemical Engineering. Through wielding a breath usually associated with struggle and impairment, to produce an object of wonder, these sculptures acknowledged and celebrated what is taken for granted by others – the preciousness of a single breath. These objects were placed on a glass shelf with the backdrop of a eucalyptus tree (use in the treatment of respiratory problems), and trembled ever so slightly throughout the day, as visitors walked past.
My practice explore overlaps and connections between various university departments, and I regularly draws on the expertise of individuals from disciplines ranging from chemistry, medical imaging, physics, engineering and botany, to create artworks and curate shows portraying the intersection between the quantifiable and the poetic. My PhD thesis (2021) took the form of an object study that exposed the limitations of insider knowledge and systems of categorisation within the academic departments of the University of Cape Town, and demonstrated the explanatory, interdisciplinary potential of curatorship and artmaking.
An interest in the social, political and cultural dimensions of botany has formed an integral part of my curatorial and art production over the years, and has been a key focus area in many of the classes I have taught and modules and workshops I have convened. This exposition is a continuition of this methodology...
The Experiment (Wine into Water)
2010
Rotary evaporator, 2 round bottom flasks, 2 beakers, chilling system, test tubes, magnetic mixer, vacuum pump, activated carbon, measuring cylinder
An experiment in three parts, reversing the first miracle: The first distillation removes all the flavanoids (duration 1 hour) from the wine. A second distillation, performed at a slightly lower temperature removes the alcohol (duration 1 hour 20 minutes). Lastly ,activated carbon is added to remove the remaining acids and filtered - resulting in water as the end product (duration 20 minutes).
Planthology (Bulbine frutescens and Lessertia frutescens)
2018
Two medicinal plant specimens from Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, x-rayed at Groote Schuur Hospital. These two local plants offer a wide variety of healing properties and address the lacuna of indigenous treatments represented by the chest.
These works originally formed part of a series I made when I worked as a creative consultant in the PLC in 2011 and 2012 (see next image). A conversation with Yeats revealed that most of the plants she introduced to the environment had mysteriously died. In response, I x-rayed a selection of indigenous plant specimens – the starting point of many diagnoses in human medicine. In subjecting the plants to this process and placing the x-ray images in a space that foregrounds the diagnosis of human disease, I intended to create a heterarchical shift in this relationship, considering a world in which the degree of care directed toward human ailments might be replicated in treating diseases manifest in the botanical world.
1975 (Invasive Species)
2018
Cross section of cluster pine with ring of R4 assault rifle bullets lodged inside.
The work stems from a historical and botanical enquiry. In 1975, after attaining independence from Portugal, the civil war broke out in Angola. In that same year, the South African Defense Force under the authorization of Vorster, intervened in the war - an intervention which formed part of an ongoing period of conflict in South African history, known as the Border Wars. From a botanical point of departure, the cluster pine (or Pinus Pinaster) is native to Portugal. In South Africa it is seen as invasive, competing with and replacing indigenous species.
1975 (Invasive Species) consists of a cross section of cluster pine used as a target practice unit, into which the artist shot a ring of R4 assault rifle bullets – aiming at tree ring 1975.
Forest
2011
Echinacea angustifolia tea
A collection of Echinacea angustifolia tea rings read by botanist and dendrochronologist, Dr Edmund February. A molecule found in the Echinacea angustifolia plant prevents a caterpillar on eating it, from ever turning into a butterfly.
Example of a specimen reading: “It would appear that the tree stood on a slope since there is more compression on the left-hand side, which indicates that side was under less tension. It could also be a branch of which the left-hand side would be its underside. The rings are uniformly wide which suggests plenty of soil and moisture availability. In comparison with the other two trees, the outer rings suggest less water or more competition.”
The heart
2018
This oak was first planted sometime in the 1830s on the grounds of the University of Cape Town's Fine Art department, and caught my attention because of its hollow trunk and the fig tree that had taken root in one of its side branches – a strange symbiosis that I have followed over the years. To learn more about this tree, I invited the university's dendrochronologist, ecologist and botanist, Dr Edmund February, back to our campus to share his views on the tree and its condition.
According to February, English oaks were first brought into the country by early settlers and were one of the first exotic tree species to be planted in South Africa, shortly after Van Riebeek’s arrival in 1652. February explained that in South Africa these trees do not grow as old as they would in Europe. Our high temperatures cause them to grow faster than those back home, and their centres consequently rot and their hearts are hollowed out over time. On hearing this diagnosis, I set out to treat the tree through various artistic interventions acted out on a digital print of the tree: I filled the heart cavity with paint made by boiling the leaves of the Sutherlandia frutescens bush, an indigenous plant used locally for the treatment of heart disease, an action which I viewed as remedying the lacunae present in both the medicine chest (with its disavowal of local botanical remedies) and the tree. In addition to filling the cavity with new tree rings, I inserted hypodermic needles into selected tree rings, marking the years in which political, cultural and social events relating to hearts or oaks occurred. These seemingly disparate and arbitrary events gain significance and synchronicity when anchored and contextualised by this specific tree and its campus. The heart attacks that Cecil John Rhodes and Jan Smuts suffered in 1872 and 1950 respectively seem, for instance, to manifest the tree’s state in the human domain, while a marker on tree ring 1936 references the year U.S. track star Jesse Owens made history and destroyed Adolf Hitler’s dream of Aryan supremacy by winning four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics – where the German Olympic Committee gave athletes an oak sapling for each gold medal they won. One of Owens’s trees now towers over Rhodes High School in Cleveland, where he trained. Markers reference ring 1967, the year Chris Barnard performed the first heart transplant at Groote Schuur hospital, and 1925, the year T.S. Eliot wrote 'The hollow men', which some believed he titled after reading Josph Conrad’s Heart of darkness (1988), in which Kurtz is referred to as a ‘hollow sham’ and ‘hollow at the core’. Ring 1951 marks the year in which the National Resettlement Board issued eviction orders to Sophiatown residents, which led to two residents hanging themselves from the branches of a local English oak tree – a tree that served as a meeting place for political activists and residents over the years.
These are only a few examples. I also used charcoal made from the tree’s fallen twigs to add tree rings, circumnavigating certain objects relevant to my newly formulated botany- and cardiology-themed 'curriculum'. The new rings were generated by tracing the outlines of, for example, a 1987 and 1992 English one pound coin, which on one side depict an oak tree in a coronet; an outline of the diseased heart removed from the first heart transplant recipient, Louis Washkansky, on display in the Heart of Cape Town museum at Groote Schuur hospital; and a ring that corresponds to the circumference of the ‘Heart of oak’ (the official march of the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom) track as it is positioned on a 1989 12-inch Columbia-produced record.
In performing these treatments and drawing attention to these events and occurrences, the work demonstrates the capacity of a single object – in this instance, an ill tree – to resonate and intersect with diverse fields, from history and politics to culture and science.
Diagnosing loss
2009
IV drip, saline solution, white handkerchief, fan, fish hook
An IV drip that releases a drop every 27 seconds on a white handkerchief attached to a fan, drying it before the next drop falls.
CHEST: a botanical ecology
November 2018- March 2019
Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town
Illness and disease affects us all. The treatment of these conditions however, has been vast and varied, depending on the historical periods and the cultural context in and during which they are practiced. Situated in the Iziko South African Museum rock art gallery, where healing power is expressed in San paintings, this mobile set of cabinets explores a rich complex of healing practices through the display of a medicine chest which was donated to the university of Cape Town in 1978.
This chest belonged to a British dentist, who practiced in Cape Town from 1904, and who bought the chest for a hunting trip he undertook in 1913 to (then) Northern Rhodesia. The idea of the chest gives rise to a variety of forms of healing: from instruments used to exorcise evil spirits and children's letters written to celebrate a heart transplant; to medicinal flowers bought at the Adderley Street flower market. The exhibition aims to visualise and materialise illness and its treatment from historical, cultural and disciplinary perspectives.
Drawing on well-established historical and contemporary connections between the disciplines of Botany, Medicine and Pharmacology, the exhibits also suggest latent links which are at times political, at times whimsical.