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 (Taylor, 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 Rosalina, Fabriano Cromia, Shredded South African note money prints, Abaca
Series of 3 pieces: 2100x800mm each
Crosslines (2025)
Photographic print on Archival Photographic Paper
Series of 3 prints: 337.50 x 600 mm each (framed)
Siphoning millions from NSFAS meant for needy students (2024)
Digital print on Arches Archival Paper
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Foreshadowing Life Esidimeni (Zulu for dignity): Altering Hierarchy of Needs (2024)
Altered and cut digital print on Arches Archival Paper and Archival Foam Board
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A series of works that together explore... and has developed from... Read the Artist Statement Here.