This past week has felt especially surreal for me.

Possibly that the year now nearing ‘an end’ has been filled with so much, and at the same time, filled with nothing-ness; that it all has been so ‘strange’; that time has seemed to stand absolutely still, and then that it has also rapidly flown by. A year of exaggerated paradoxes.

This week’s posts of art include images from reference photographs that I took in 2008 and 2009.

The images of the little ‘waiting-figure-in-white-shirt’ and of the little ‘red-riding-hood-cloaked figure’ were captured from people walking alongside roads just outside of Clarens in the Free State.

Waiting and Shielding.

The little ‘pink-shirt-girl-running’ was photographed in Nottingham Road whilst road tripping the Midlands Meander.

Running forward.

I look at their images placed among scratches and marks, colours dull and rich, textures formed and smoothed, bits and pieces of photo from another time and then also from today, maps collaged with roads and rivers ending and merging; clay … sanded, scraped, even burnt with red hot heat, all coming together to form new contexts on a surface.

These little people from then, would be young adults now. In my artworks, they remain children.

And then, that these works will soon travel across oceans to convey still new messages and meanings for new ‘owners/custodians’ in lands that I do not know, but know of. Lands my ancestors came from. Lands that I am both connected and disconnected to.

Time is such a strange thing I think.