Flood Malawi I

This painting in river clay and burnt plant material on 100% cotton canvas belongs to my Flood Series, a visual record of global flooding events since 2023. This collection was born from an experience that forever changed me: witnessing the devastating floods in Malawi, Africa, in March 2023. Knowing people directly affected by the disaster made the event deeply personal and visceral, leaving me feeling that I need to look more deeply at floods all over the globe.

This reawakened my awareness of water as a form of matter with intense aliveness and agency: a substance with the capacity to change the face of a place unrecognisably. In the aftermath of its raging, settled water has the ability to dissolve sound. It is this quality of stillness after a catastrophe that I found most compelling about the floods in 2023 and 2024. For me these moments were steeped with both immense awe and the devastation of loss.

Most of the paintings in this series are made with river clay that I collected from a river in Worcester (South Africa) where my mother lived and played as a child. I have worked with this clay that is associated with my maternal ancestry for about 10 years now, and it has become a substance that I know intimately and that has much meaning for me. My choice of burnt plant material blended with a binder to make paint, has a long history in my practice. It stems from my work with indigenous fynbos which has to burn in order to propagate.

Thus, like the phoenix rising from the ashes, burnt plant material represents hope and rebirth in my work.