What I’ve been up to and thinking about lately,
The Living City
Methods, brought together a body of work of work by practitioners and educators whose practices move fluidly across design, art, teaching pedagogy, and built form. It foregrounded research not as something that follows making, but as something embedded within it. I will write a longer post on that soon, but I thought i’d share my…
Material ecologies of post-mining cities
The challenged of being a creative, practice researchers, who working with artistic practice as, the predominant medium, is that, often people seem to overlook the subject matter of the research, when cThe challenge of being a creative, practice researcher who works with artistic practice as the predominant medium is that people often overlook the research’s…
ARTWORKS
This new body of work considers the question of the atmosphere of the post-mining city, and its particulate entanglements with the human bodied who reside there. Works Prices at R1500- Excluding shipping *Please state the name of the work/s and your shipping location for an accurate quote. Please allow a day or two for a…
ARTWORKS + INSTALLATIONS
ARTWORKS FOR SALE THE LIVING CITY 2026 Digital Artworks, prints on perspex – Limited Editions 3 Print Run R5000- ATMOS 2025 This new body of work considers the question of the atmosphere of the post-mining city, and its particulate entanglements with the human bodied who reside there. Works Prices at R2500- Excluding shipping *Please state…
water, rights and sanitation
a small rant… Tell me you grew up in Apartheid South Africa without telling me you grew up in Apartheid South Africa. For me, at least, it is people who restrict toilet access. Let’s just say, when I watched ‘The Help’ a few years back, it resonated. It’s a whole thing. Mid rant, about the…
On taking note in an world dominated by AI
The longer I work as a creative, the more I am convinced that all creativity lies in a keen sense of observation, and the good sense to take note. Creativity, I firmly believe, is a skill, not a talent, in contrast to the carefully perpetuated myth of the genius, artist, architect, and designer who are…
Weaving worlds II – what women make
Weaving worlds II I once calculated that the distance in wool my grandmother had knitted throughout her lifetime, 94 years, 3 months and 21 days, was roughly equivalent to the earth’s circumference, 40 075km. I have estimated that the weight of the stone I have shifted throughout my PhD is approximately 9,8 tons[1]. I have…
Weaving Worlds: women who make I
I would describe myself as many things: artist, researcher, architect, teacher, dancer, swimmer, woman, and maker. These last two are things of complexity. To quote Patti Smith ‘As an artist, I never wanted to be fettered by gender nor recognized or defined as a female poet, musician or singer. They don’t do that with men…
Autumn: some reflections , and some books
It’s once again autumn here in Johannesburg. It’s also mid-semester break, which can sometimes be the only time I get in the year to make work more or less uninterrupted. These seven odd days have proved to be golden in the past years; I’ve gotten most of my productive work done in them for the…
c o u n t
Some reflections on numbers 5240 words a visual representation – Despite changes to criteria publication to included creative practice outputs in the south African academic context. Both criteria for promotion and credibility of research to stem primarily from written form. The number of words in essays, or the number of times an paper has been…
Maintaining the right to think unconventionally and other knowledge hills that I will die on.
an ode to the frustration of academic bureaucracy and the tyranny of ‘merican’ eng-l-esh in a computer based world. Arguing for the right to think To create knowledge in unconventional ways. In conventional form, it is absurd. Arguing for the periphery through the modalities of the centre is futile. The centre always wins. There is…
I read banned books
First they will come for your books, then they will come for your art. An interesting Guardian article came into my inbox recently, ‘US public school ban 10 000 books in most recent academic year.’ [1], Apparently, US children and young adults are not allowed to learn to assess for themselves the difference between wrong and…
I’m thinking of becoming a Dadaist
do not be alarmed the bellow should be considered to be satire…see ‘The mutterings project’ for prior reference. One reaches a moment in ones life, where the future seems to stretch out into infinite dullness. filled with administration and management, of things and others- lackluster. No amount of incentive seems to, be enough to band-aid…
The most liberating idea in creative practice
Your work doesn’t matter. Yes you heard that right. It has recently occurred to me, that my work doesn’t matter. I’m unlikely to change the course of history by making art that counters issues of the Anthropocene. Mostly the people I work with have no interest in my work at all not beyond a citation…
Artwork and idea in proccess – weaving with carrier bags
Since my primary aim here, is to make a case for practice, and proccess as research method. Laboratory for those hard scientist among you. I though I would share, a recent presentation and workshop I gave in Helsinki, as part of the, °City is sound, city is quicksand° event at Hietsu pavilion! Hosted by the…
…Before Breakfast
As in; as in ‘I can think of six impossible things…’ Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes, I’ve believed as many…
Gathering, a carrier bag theory of art making
What have I been up to recently? Are you wondering? In the post-doctoral land, in the way that I work, I suppose I’m in a gathering phase, something about weathering, the weather, and breathing in this altered atmosphere. They may seem to be somewhat unrelated things. Nevertheless, in the turn of my mind, they are…
Why architects from Africa are not designing buildings, and what the West could learn.
A manifesto in one sentence. Any architect, taking seriously the effect of the built environment on climate change and the role of building construction materials in our rapidly heating world, must conclude that the moral responsibility for architects is to no longer consider making buildings as the primary project of the architectural profession, both now…
Terraforming Johannesburg
For a while now, those of you who know Johannesburg well may know that most of the mine tailings along the Witwatersrand mining belt have been quietly disappearing. We are observing a significant change in the terrain of Johannesburg as it has existed for the past 100 years. The mining stip has long represented a…
About creative practice research, thinking with things (Part 1)
What does it mean to think with things? To entwine one’s mind with the more than human entities that dwell within vital terrains, urban or otherwise? To use a commonly accepted definition of creative research, Christopher Frailing, in his paper on research in art and design, suggests that for an activity to count in either…
How do you journal? (for real people?)
I have a confession to make… Although I own a copy, I have never read Julia Cameron’s ‘The Artist Way’. I’ve tried to read War and Peace; I’ve read The Brothers Karamazov. I’ve read, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s‘ A Thousand Plateaus’,1 But for my life, I cannot get past the introduction. Kate on Good…
AFTER…the post PhD Blues
It’s been a long year… I finally completed my PhD corrections in July of this year. For various pedestrian reasons, not limited to my own health frustrations, an eight-month examination process, supervisors on opposit ends of the world from where I was working, a recurrence of glandular fever, leaving me devoid of energy outside of…
That which makes us human: about the creative impulse and ChattieG.
I’m trying to change the world one sequin at a time-Lady GaGa In the last few months, as an academic whose work deals with both the existential threats of climate change and the balanity of teaching basics of building construction to first years, among a host of healthy, dull administrative duties, I find myself facing…
Recommended Reading
JOURNALS Arcadia (Online, open access, Rachel Carson Centre) Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience (Open Journal System) Environmental Humanities (Duke University Press: International, peer-reviewed, Open Access) Interconnections: journal of posthumanism/Interconnexions: revue de posthumanisme Journal of Gender and Power (Adam Mickiewicz University) Kvinder, køn og forskning (peer-reviewed Danish journal of feminist research) Matter: Journal of New Materialist…
Happenstance
The most famous works of art often rely on accident or chance.Contrary to the general belief portrayed by the art world, many of the most famous works of art happen by accident; they are a timely response to global events, responses to general fed-up-ness with vapid art, and expressive moments of inspiration that shift trajectories…
Creative Practice Research Outputs
People often ask me what creative practice research is; it is a lot of things; for me, principally, it is using my creative practice as a staging point for thinking, adding layers of depth to thinking about issues we face today, with the things of the material world. Post extractive urban terrains, the implication we…
