2 November 2013

I started these drawings and paintings thinking about my Mother’s garden. It was large, like a landscape, and she grew masses of flowers, which she later sold in Church Square in Pretoria. My father was also intimately involved in the planning of the beds and transport. He was a cartographer. The way my mother planned her gardens and mapping have become conflated in my mind. Maps are a coded sign language which one has to learn to read and are not really a representation but rather of a world seen from way above the ground where nature's detail is lost but information is supplied in signs and words so maps are both general and specific, close and far, real and abstract, and for me they are about compressed information. Like most maps, especially used folded ones that you can put in your pocket, they are reminiscent of place and filial alliances.  So I folded my paper into equal parts like the lines of a folded map but made a single image across the parts.

In some referential and highly personal way these works, which evoke landscape rather than garden, are shrouded in memory. Embedded in them is something of my past, my identity.