Precarious Structures
This body of work comprises artworks that examine the interplay between images and image-objects and how societies imagine human need, security and survival, how they shape one another. It explores how images that promise coherence, order and stability might simultaneously conceal conditions of fragility. The project unfolds within South Africa's uneven and unstable social, political and economic landscape, where systems intended to provide safety, dignity and care frequently become compromised. Working across sculpture, installation, aerial photography and conceptual image-object intervention, the works do not simply represent these conditions but intervene in the visual and material structures through which systems of need are imagined and maintained.
The inquiry draws on Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (1943), approached not only as a psychological model but as a widely circulating image-object. Through acts of cutting, inversion, displacement and translation into other materials, the works probe the extent to which the diagram's visual authority can be unsettled. The investigation extends beyond the diagram's likeness, where Maslow's hierarchy becomes a conceptual underpinning rather than a fixed form.
The work is moreover underpinned by Charles Taylor's notion of Social Imaginaries (2004), understood as the tacit ways in which we imagine ourselves to be. These imaginaries are not held as formal theories, but are carried through images, narratives and shared visual forms. While Maslow's pyramid operates as one such image, the idea of hierarchy exceeds the diagram itself, taking on more diffuse forms within collective understanding. The works, therefore, engage not only with the image of the pyramid, but with the persistence of hierarchical thinking as an organising principle, questioning how such structures of stability can be sustained even where the systems they describe remain unstable.
Tipping Point (2025) explores this through a sculptural installation developed through papermaking. Shredded South African banknote prints are pulped, dissolved and reconstituted into fragile handmade sheets formed into structures resembling fragile corrugated asbestos roofing. As currency is broken down into fibre and reformed into surface, the work probes how systems of value are constructed and destabilised. The resulting structures carry striking visual richness — colourful fragments embedded within delicate paper forms — producing an aesthetic intensity that stands in tension with the conditions the work invokes. Installed in a precarious configuration, it stages a sustained interplay between visual seduction and structural vulnerability.
Crosslines (2025) extends the investigation through drone photography, revealing patterns formed by illegally dumped asbestos materials within the grounds of a public hospital in Bloemfontein. From above, the debris produces visually compelling compositions. This aesthetic order exists in tension with the toxicity of the material and the institutional conditions that produced it.
Two further works — Foreshadowing Life Esidimeni (Zulu for dignity): Altering Hierarchy of Needs (2024) and Siphoning millions from NSFAS meant for needy students (2024) — engage Maslow's diagram directly as a found, conceptual and object. Through subtle acts of cutting, inversion and reconfiguration, the triangular structure is seemingly destabilised from within. The diagram's clarity and visual authority persist, yet small disruptions unsettle its internal logic, exposing how systems that promise stability may contain and foreshadow the conditions of their own fragility.
Across the body of work, aesthetic seduction and structural danger operate in deliberate tension. Colour, pattern and visual coherence draw the viewer in, while the materials and processes embedded within the works reveal conditions of vulnerability and risk, probing how images and image-objects actively shape social imaginaries of stability, even where those structures remain precarious.
The works have been disseminated through national and international curated exhibitions and competitions, and an international art residency. These are: Visual Languages (2025), South African Academy for Science and Art, Pretoria, curated by Jan van der Merwe; Breaking Ground: A Stethoscope Exhibition (2025), University of the Free State, Bloemfontein; Vuleka Art Competition (2025), Cape Town; Echoes of Resilience: Trauma, Healing, Memory: A Stethoscape Exhibition (2024) and its iteration at the international conference, Global Social Innovation Indaba (2024), University of the Free State; The Ampersand Foundation Residency (2024) in New York - one of the artworks in the body of work permanently installed in the Ampersand Foundation Collection, New York City, New York, USA.
Tipping Point (2025)
Handmade, moulded paper: Fabriano Rosapina, Fabriano Cromia, Shredded South African note money prints, Abaca
Series of 3 pieces: 2100x800mm each
Tipping Point (2025) is a sculptural triptych constructed from handmade paper and shredded South African banknotes, moulded to resemble the familiar form of corrugated asbestos roofing sheets. The surface, fragile and uneven, bears the marks of its making—soaked, pressed, and dried into place—evoking both the visual memory and material trace of decay. Leaning at a deliberate angle against the wall, the three components of the work form a precarious triangle, an unstable geometry that alludes, obliquely, to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. This work emerges from the ongoing scandal surrounding the 2014 R255 million asbestos audit and replacement tender in the Free State, a project riddled with irregularities and overseen by former premier Ace Magashule and other implicated individuals. Though the tender was ostensibly issued to remove hazardous asbestos roofing from vulnerable homes, not a single sheet has been replaced. The funds, however, have been spent. What remains is absence: of accountability, of justice, of shelter. In Tipping Point, the act of soaking shredded currency in water and reconstituting it into the form of shelter speaks directly to the laundering of both money and responsibility. The material process of dissolution and remaking becomes a quiet metaphor for corruption—its mechanisms, its consequences, and its cost. The paper’s fragility, its breaking points, and the delicacy of its surface signal a state of exposure, echoing the bodily vulnerability of those left to inhabit these contaminated structures. The title resonates on several registers: a moment of crisis, a structural threshold, the possibility of collapse. It also gestures toward tipping as bribery, and tipping off as the courageous act of whistleblowing. In this triangulation—between need, power, and complicity—the work poses a question: What does it mean when the most basic of human needs are bartered away for personal gain? And at what cost do these transactions occur?
Tipping Point (2025) was selected for the Visual Languages (2025) exhibition by Dr Jan van der Merwe, held at the SA Academy for Science and Art in Pretoria, South Africa and for the Breaking Ground: A Stethoscape Exhibition (2025) as part of the main art festival of the Free State Arts Festival, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa.
Crosslines (2025)
Photographic print on Archival Photographic Paper
Series of 3 prints: 337.50 x 600 mm each (framed)
Crosslines (2025) is a series of three aerial photographs I captured with a drone in May 2025, documenting illegally dumped asbestos at the National Hospital in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Following recent renovations, the hospital discarded asbestos roofing material on its premises, even though the use and dumping of asbestos have been illegal in South Africa since 2008. The title refers to both the visual crossed lines present in the compositions — formed by discarded beams, cables, and debris — and the metaphorical crossing of ethical lines through the neglect of environmental and public health responsibilities. The work highlights the irony of a medical institution, a place intended for care and healing, becoming a site of contamination and danger. Through this series, I aim to reflect on systemic neglect, blurred lines of accountability, and the consequences of infrastructural disregard within the urban landscape.
Crosslines was selected for the Visual Languages (2025) exhibition by Dr Jan van der Merwe, held at the SA Academy for Science and Art in Pretoria, South Africa and was selected as a finalist work in the Vuleka Art Competition (2025), The Arts Association of Belville, Cape Town, South Africa.
Foreshadowing Life Esidimeni (Zulu for dignity): Altering Hierarchy of Needs (2024)
Altered photographic print on Archival Paper
310 x 520 mm (framed)
Foreshadowing Life Esidimeni (Zulu for dignity): Altering Hierarchy of Needs (2024) engages Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943) as a widely circulating diagram through which ideas of human care, dignity and development are commonly organised. In this work, the pyramid is approached not only as a psychological theory but as a found image-object whose visual authority structures how human needs are imagined.
The intervention is minimal. Two sides of the triangular diagram—the left edge and the base—are carefully cut and pressed slightly downward into the paper surface. This subtle alteration causes the edges of the pyramid to sink inward, introducing a faint shift in shadow and depth. The diagram remains recognisable, yet its stability is quietly unsettled. What appears fixed begins to give way, as if the hierarchy were weakening from within.
The work was produced during an artist residency in New York City, The Ampersand Foundation (TAF), where exposure to conceptual art practices foregrounded the potential of small, precise gestures to alter the meaning of familiar images. The intervention, therefore, operates through restraint. A slight incision into the diagram becomes sufficient to disturb the visual logic that sustains it.
The title refers to the Life Esidimeni tragedy in South Africa, where over 140 vulnerable mental health patients died after being transferred from specialised care facilities to inadequately resourced organisations, as reported by the Health Ombudsman Professor Makgoba (2017). The name Esidimeni, meaning “place of dignity,” introduces a stark irony. Dignity is implicitly embedded within Maslow’s hierarchical model, yet the institutional structures meant to uphold it proved catastrophically fragile.
Rather than representing the tragedy directly, the work engages the diagram as a structure that promises order and progression. By pressing into the triangular form, the intervention introduces a quiet disturbance within the image that organises this logic. The slight sinking of the pyramid suggests a structural weakening, where the hierarchy itself begins to falter.
In this way, the work contributes to a broader inquiry into how images that promise coherence and stability can simultaneously reveal the fragility of the systems they attempt to organise, and how such images participate in shaping social imaginaries of care and dignity.
Siphoning millions from NSFAS meant for needy students (2024)
Photographic print on Archival Paper
310 x 520 mm (framed)
Siphoning millions from NSFAS meant for needy students (2024) engages Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943) as a familiar diagram through which ideas of development, opportunity and self-actualisation are commonly structured. In this work, the pyramid is approached not as a neutral explanatory model but as a widely circulating image-object that organises assumptions about progression and access.
The intervention is minimal yet decisive. The triangular diagram is inverted within the picture plane, displacing what is conventionally understood as foundational. The pyramid remains recognisable—its colour, form and visual clarity intact—yet its orientation introduces a dissonance between what is seen and what is assumed. What should support the hierarchy now appears suspended and unstable.
The intervention is minimal yet decisive. The triangular diagram is inverted within the picture plane, displacing what is conventionally understood as foundational. The pyramid remains recognisable—its colour, form and visual clarity intact—yet its orientation introduces a dissonance between what is seen and what is assumed. What should support the hierarchy now appears suspended and unstable.
Where Foreshadowing Life Esidimeni (Zulu for dignity): Altering Hierarchy of Needs (2024) introduces a quiet collapse within the diagram through subtle incisions, this work operates through inversion. Together, these gestures probe the internal instability of a structure that promises ordered progression.
The work is situated in relation to widely reported failures and irregularities within the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), including corruption and dysfunction in the systems responsible for distributing student funding. Within the logic of Maslow’s hierarchy, access to higher education is closely tied to movement toward self-actualisation. NSFAS operates at this threshold by enabling students to pursue tertiary education despite economic precarity. When this support falters, the hierarchy itself becomes unstable.
Through inversion, the work gives visual form to this disruption. The pyramid no longer supports upward movement but appears precariously suspended, suggesting a system in which access to opportunity becomes uncertain and unevenly distributed.
The work was conceived for exhibition within a university environment where the realities of NSFAS funding directly affect students’ ability to study. It was first exhibited on the campus of the University of the Free State as part of Echoes of Resilience: Trauma, Healing, Memory: A Stethoscape Exhibition (2024), and later reinstalled during the Global Social Innovation Indaba (2024), an international conference co-hosted by the University of the Free State. Since then, it has been installed within the Fine Arts Department on campus, where its continued presence maintains an ongoing dialogue with the students whose lived experiences it explores.
The inverted pyramid occupies a large surrounding field of space, intensifying its sense of suspension and isolation. In this way, the work contributes to a broader inquiry into how images of hierarchy shape social imaginaries of aspiration and mobility, and how such structures may be unsettled through subtle acts of artistic intervention.