Artist Database

“I am a language lecturer at the North-West University in Potchefstroom, and alongside my academic work, I maintain a multidisciplinary visual art practice that includes painting, drawing and printmaking. I have been drawn to art since childhood and, as a student, studied drawing and acrylic painting privately under Stella Olivier (a photojournalist for William Kentridge). In recent years, I have expanded my practice through private, self-directed study, exploring linocut and watercolour, and drawing continual inspiration from natural designs. My academic and artistic interests intersect in recent research on visual art, landscape and cultural narratives (investigating the Afrikaner press’s framing of Jacob Hendrik Pierneef’s landscapes in ways that linked landscape and cultural identity). My selection as a finalist in the 2025 Sasol New Signatures art competition set in motion a more public art journey. In the same year, I also participated in a collaborative public mural project as part of the LovePotch community upliftment initiative. This year, I was nominated one of three winners of the Picture This children’s book illustration competition, hosted by Protea Books. My winning illustrations will be included in an international catalogue to be presented to publishers during the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in 2027.

My work begins with a fascination with the designs found in the natural world around me, which I admire in daily walks along the Mooiriver and through the veld. I am fascinated by small, daily manifestations of transcendent wisdom in leaves, seeds and unassuming creatures. An act of discovery that inspires my practice. I am interested in the relationship between nature, human imagination and creativity. Natural spaces represent places of refuge and freedom which condition and stimulate the emergence
of stories and new meanings. My work often inhabits the space between the familiar and the imagined and is intended to invite dreams and contemplation as further acts of creativity. In my practice, art is not mainly a vehicle for confrontation or critique, but a way to catalyse attentiveness and tenderness. I seek to celebrate curiosity in the natural world and the human capacity to respond to it in ways that express imagination, creative meaning-making and personal appropriation.”