Born in the mid70s, in Zimbabwe, grew up on a farm in the Matabeleland province. I come from a creative family - both parents artistic, and my sister a professional sculptor. After a year in art school I decided to drop out and go adventuring overseas - a belated Gap Year, thinking that I would soon return and continue to study. However the years became decades and my creativity got buried, but not forgotten - promising myself that One Day I would Get Around To It Again. The excitement, adventure and rewards of love, life, travels and a surprising career in management and leadership taking my attention and time. Until, after a series of personal challenges, it came to an abrupt pause mid2020, when I discovered I had developed stage 3, grade 3 breast cancer. I augmented my 12 months of treatment by rediscovering the practice and rewards of art and creativity, exploring all the techniques I once loved - printmaking, stained glass making, sculpture, ceramics, drawing and painting. Over that period it was clear my life was going in a different trajectory, one that truly embraced the illusive Work/Life balance. It was a call to fully embrace my talent and to wholeheartedly commit to nurturing it.
My art / process:
My creative practice is still very much 'practice', a case of picking up forgotten and neglected skills and working through the frustrations of relearning, and learning new skills. And vitally, building a sustainable consistent commitment to practice - which is one of the core reasons I find myself a student again, enrolled with the TLC and grateful for the availability and accessibility of such amazing places here in wellington. Having explored quite a few avenues, I have found myself resonating the most with 3D and creating objects in clay. And curious about the process of replication and how the technical requirements of different materials, constrain or influence the object being created. Being very much a Cat Person, (useful when married to a Vet), I had no choice but to use as my Muse our rather magnificent flatmate - Mr Fox, a very large, ginger, Maine Coon whose haughty demeanour intimidates all visitors human and animal alike.In parallel with all of this, I was also exploring this new version of myself, the one who got a second chance. In the process of adjusting to the fact that my body now looks different from the typical feminine form, I was inspired by a photography collection in my oncologists office, celebrating the scars of breast cancer survivors, beautiful pictures of beautiful bodies and I found myself drawn to re-create and reconnect with it in clay and 3D and develop the theme of replication, duplication, reinvention and second chances. The collection presented here, titled the Amazons (Icons, and Warriors), is the first in what I hope will become a series of explorations of the altered form, using different techniques and materials. The gold backdrops inspired by the iconography of religious artefacts and symbols of shrines and beauty. Although the forms are replicated using press-molds, I love the variety that is achieved as each is one has to be joined and finished individually, and even if using the same glaze it will come out differently depending on the clay used and the kiln gods, and when they get damaged in the creation process, the fun of finding a way to fix them still make them beautiful and celebrates the beauty found in resilience and transformation.
