My practise investigates the notion of Animism within a contemporary framework, its influences from my experience living in Zimbabwe and especially its relativity to the critical issues of Ecology.
Questioning structures of power and influence, laying bare injustices and hypocrisies while maintaining an amused attachment to the myths through which identity – individual and rationale is constructed.
The apparent dis-connectivity and connectivity and their human cost are foregrounded in my oversized watercolour paintings in which divisions of hierarchy and animal symbolism are questioned.
The risky method of applying deep amounts of water and colour, orchestrated together, to reach a disconcerting harmony that, as the water begins to dry and the colour freezes in time, the result is a creative explosion that conveys a narrative linked to colonialism, post colonialism and corruption.
Often the works create their own non- linear narrative where animal figures are more speculative rather than a direct reference to current social, political or historical culture, and instead depicts a world in which indications of specific place or time are absent.
The approach to abstraction and fragmentation evokes connotations relating to corruption, displacement, liberation and extinction.
Detail of 'Panthera pardus'
Watercolour
56cm x 76cm
2019
Present in most of the works is a sense of movement that is due to the evolving process of anarchy, disruption, uncertainty and connection, that can be characterised as instability.
Using water as the medium to provoke these shifts of movement and to carve out new paths in other directions that reveal a visual language of imagery linked to the words environment/nature/culture/ and their interpreted dogmas that become questioned in relation to my research.