Here, there and everywhere, 2025

Detail.
Spalling Together, 2025
Cast mesh within mulched paper with acrylic on canvas 
159.5 x 122 x 5.3 cm
Detail.
This world should be more wonderful, 2025
Mulched paper with acrylic on canvas
130 x 100 x 5.3 cm
Above.
Pine, 2025
Mulched paper with acrylic on canvas
159.5 x 106 x 5.3 cm
The promise of repair by Hedley Twidle At some point in the last ten years, human-made things – infrastructure, concrete, metals, asphalts, aggregates, plastics and all the rest – began to exceed the combined weight of all biomass on earth. Exactly where you place the crossover point depends: are we counting only things constructed (bridges, roads, buildings)? Or also the waste left behind after their making: mine dumps, tailings, landfill, scrapyards, piles of rubble? In 1900 (scientists estimate) human-made stuff clocked in at 3% of organic matter (everything from trees to tundra, cattle to plankton). Today human civilization weighs in at 1,1 trillion metric tonnes (the more conservative estimate). A million million tonnes, that is, pressing down on the earth’s crust, present and future.
Detail.
Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart, 2025
Mulched paper with acrylic on canvas 
159.5 x 106 x 5.3 cm
Above.
Between here and there, 2025
Decommissioned signal cable, wire, cement
18.5 x 200 x 3 cm

Taking things, and breaking things, and making things, and faking things, 2025

Work.
Taking things, and breaking things, and making things, and faking Things, 2025
Asphalt, railway line slate, decommissioned signal cable, wire, paper, concrete
144 x 250 x 8 cm
Above. Studies of the sculptural qualities of paper, how it takes form, holds weight, holds sound, focusses and collapses. Manifesting as paper clockweights proportionate to the mass of stones left where they were found (2,65 kgs, 2.4kgs, 1.72kg), viewfinders, fulcrums, balancing acts and a narrow stone garden. 

Everything must change for everything to remain the same, 2025

Left.
Everything must change for everything to remain the same, 2025
Cast mesh within mulched paper with acrylic on canvas 
159.5 x 106 x 5.3 cm
Above. Movement studies and process within studio

Pine, 2025

Work.
Pine, 2025
Mulched paper with acrylic on canvas
159.5 x 106 x 5.3 cm
Above. Spread mulched paper with acrylic

Together is a beautiful place to be, 2023

Above. Using archival photographs from the Simons Town Museum’s Project Phoenix Collection, the proportions of artist Frank Brown’s front doorway in Dido Valley were abstracted and recreated to scale. The layered elevation forms part of an ongoing series that recollects the architectural details of lost buildings, or buildings on the brink of loss through demolition or willful neglect, recreated 1:1 in mulched paper.
Left.
Together is a beautiful place to be, 2023
Mulched sheet music with acrylic and a handful of plaster
141 x 186 x 5.6 cm
Above. Found sheet music shredded for mulching.

Studies of stone into paper, and paper into stone, 2024

Left.
Studies of stone into paper, and paper into stone, 2024
Soapstone dust, paper, plaster, pigments, adhesive
65 x 31 x 12.5 cm
Above.Ground soapstone dust

'Between holes 8 and 10, past the two palm trees', 2023

Left.
'Between holes 8 and 10 between the two palm trees', 2023
Mulched paper with pigments
180 x 128 x 5 cm
Left. Tracing the silhouette of cobble paving stones left unturned: building rubble of a city re-organised around exclusion and erasure.
Left. Land in a context like South Africa is inseparable from absence and dislocation. It has a long memory of destruction and repurposing, of unbuilding to build. Put another way, ‘Landscape, is gradually emerging as a broad term to describe cultural fields of memorialisation, as well as physical spaces.’ (Beningfield, 2006).
Above. ‘Between holes 8 and 10 past the two palm trees’ were the directions given when tracking building remains from the razed inner city neighborhood District Six. The tons and tons of rubble were reportedly used to infill a wetland and extend the foundations of a nearby suburban golf course.

Things take time, and time takes things, 2023

Left.
Things take time, and time takes things, 2023
Mulched paper shelved on painted MDF board
141 x 186 x 5.6 cm
Notes. A shelved garden of maquettes offering cues on the transformation from land to landscape: a stone collection, a dry-wall terrace, a field, a hedge and a forest. Markers of making and maintaining, breaking and repair.

Everything around it all, 2023

Left.
Everything around it all, 2023
Mulched newsprint shelved on painted MDF board
198 x 129,5 x 7 cm
Above and Right. Everything around it all mulches leftover newspaper donated by the Simons Town Museum’s Project Phoenix Collection. This archive, comprised of a diverse collection of media, collects published stories related to both current and former residents displaced and removed from the area. With select clippings retained by the museum, the surrounding leftover news stories from that same day, the negative space, were then mulched. The background, context and everyday noise surrounding loss and displacement.

261-344 Main Road, 2024

Above and Left. Streetscapes change with the buildings that frame them, and the paper used to periodically block out street-facing windows often foreshadows a shift; a sign of impending closures, re-development, gentrification and demolition. 261-344 Main Road, Salt River (2024) is a series of six works derived from the cladded paper lining six shop windows and their reflections of the adjacent former Rex Trueform factory, a decommissioned modernist building in Cape Town typifying the complex history of social division in South Africa. Comprised of mulched window paper and gauze the works take form as faint architectural impressions of Rex Trueform; interstitial spaces worn through use and touch that escape or exceed the modernist blueprint, indents and repairs, brokenness and irreparability. Unstitching Rex Trueform (Wolff, 2017) details how divisively form can follow function in building social division, chronicling Rex Trueform’s entangled policy matrix of the Group Areas Act, international sanctions and post-apartheid trade agreements; the politics of heritage classification and strategies of wilful neglect; and the stasis of buildings too difficult to uphold or commemorate, nor forget; all reflected in six window panes.
Above. Window paper in studio before being mulched
Works.
261-344 Main Road / 1-4, 2024
Mulched window paper with acrylic and gauze on canvas
106.5 x 159.5 x 5cm (each)
Notes.  “Can we read the story of Rex Trueform as a parable? If so, in what ways does the parable show up the entanglements of the production of space and state-endorsed enterprise with the construction of race, the expression of national identity, and the formation of local subjectivities?"
Unstitching Rex Trueform, the Story of an African Factory by Ilze Wolff (2017:37)

Gathering dust, losing ground, 2025

Left.
Gathering dust, losing ground, 2025
Mulched paper with acrylic on canvas 
130 x 100 x 5.3 cm

Hurry up and wait, 2023

Detail.
Hurry up and wait, 2023
Mulched paper on linen board
130 x 130 x 5.6 cm

I guess we’ll never know / Found shreddings (Bag#1), 2022

Detail.
I guess we’ll never know / Found shreddings (Bag#1), 2022
Mulched paper on cotton board
51 x 117 cm

What a time to be a denier, 2023

Work.
What a time to be a denier, 2023
Mulched paper with pigments
155.5 x 104.5 x 5 cm

Buried between a lagoon and a golf course, 2024

Left. Buried between a lagoon and a golf course traces the silhouette of a stone left unturned; granite building rubble from a city re-organised around exclusion and erasure, where the remains of a violently demolished neighbourhood were reportedly used to infill a nearby wetland and extend the foundations of a private golf course. It forms part of a series on stones – taken, placed, thrown, left – in the making and unmaking of place.
Work.
Buried between a lagoon and a golf course, 2023
Mulched paper with pigments
154,5 x 104,5 x 5 cm

Maps of nowhere in particular I, 2023

Work.
Maps of nowhere in particular I, 2023
Mulched paper with a handful of plaster on book linen
132 x 184 x 6 cm

Sweet Water Stone, 2024

Above.Camisa Stream sourced historic image
Above and Left.Studies of water flow and stones in the Platteklip Stream
Work.
Sweet Water Stone, 2024
Mulched paper with acrylic on canvas
183 x 122 x 5 cm

Up Close at Distance, 2022

Notes.Up Close at a Distance formed part of a duo exhibition alongside Unathi Mkonto titled Enclosed Camp exhibited at OPEN24HRS from 16 February - 23rd May 2022. Six monotone landscapes were shown together with three sculptures by Mkonto. A review of the show, Raw Materials Make Magic by Sean O’Tool can be read here.
Works.
In order of appearance.

The idea of too far, 2022
Mulched paper with acrylic on linen
182 x 138 x 5.6 cm 

Where else to sink it, 2022
Mulched paper with acrylic on linen
101.7 x 77 x 5.6 cm

High tide, 2022
Mulched paper with acrylic on linen
101.7 x 77 x 5.6 cm

Low tide, 2022
Mulched paper with acrylic on linen
101.7 x 77 x 5.6 cm

To a glassel, 2023

Detail.
To a glassel, 2023
Mulched paper on linen board
130 x 130 x 5.6 cm

Fuming, 2023

Detail.
Fuming, 2023
Mulched paper with pigments
154,5 x 104,5 x 5 cm

Two more stones from Nukain’s garden, 2023

Above. Nukain garden on visiting in September 2022.
Above. The upper half of Nukain Mabuza’s Stone Garden in the early 1980s. Source: The Painted Stone Garden of Nukain Mabuza, JFC Clarke, 2013
Left.
Two more stones from Nukain’s garden, 2023
Mulched paper with pigments
160 x 160 x 5 cm
Above.Throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s the artist and farm worker Nukain Mbuzapainted and rearranged stones of a hillside in Mpumalanga. Pictured above is the original ‘altar’ boulder positioned in the lower half of the garden, alongside documentation of a visit in September 2022. Today the stones still remain in place, faded, some partially repainted; palimpsests of placemaking.

Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart, 2025

Detail.
Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart, 2025
Mulched paper with acrylic on canvas 
159.5 x 106 cm