Everything begins with a photograph I took myself, and ends with a surface you have to stand close to in order to understand.
Each piece is constructed from thousands of hand-cut fragments taken from my own photographs. Nothing is printed as a whole. From a distance the surface settles into a landscape, and up close it comes apart again into paper.
Hangklip Shoreline
The largest work of the shoreline series, and the one that took the longest to let go of.
- Medium
- Photographic collage
- Size
- 160 × 100 cm
Six works made between 2022 and 2024. Drag the strip, use the arrows, or open any piece to see the surface at full size.
South African photographic collage artist based in Cape Town
Selected exhibitions
I have been making photographic collage for nine years, working from a small studio in Woodstock with a view of the mountain and far too many boxes of prints.
The work sits somewhere between photography and painting. I photograph a place repeatedly, print it, and then cut those prints into thousands of fragments that are reassembled by hand until the surface holds the light of the original.
Nothing is generated, stretched or duplicated. If a fragment appears in a piece, I stood in front of it with a camera first. It is a slow way to work, and that slowness is the point.
I make every piece by hand, from photographs I took myself.
Photograph
Everything begins on foot with a camera. I only ever work from my own negatives, so a piece cannot exist until I have stood in the place it comes from.
Cut
Prints are cut down by hand, one fragment at a time. No two pieces are the same size, and nothing is trimmed by machine.
Assemble
The fragments are laid dry, moved, and moved again until the light behaves. Only then is anything fixed to the board.
Seal
Each finished surface is sealed and framed in raw ash, so the work can be read as one image from across the room and as thousands from up close.
