In January 2022 my husband, Johann van der Schijff and I set off on an adventure. With little experience and not much planning we traveled across Zimbabwe, into Botswana and back to Cape Town through Namibia.
The time spent in these wild and remote places made me realise that this is where I am at my creative best. The quietness and the peace that comes with being on the open road and time spent simply in the long grass looking up at the world is where I need to be.
For 2023 we will be embarking on new adventure, Expedition II. Our compass awe-inspiring travel experience travelling further across the Southern Africa
In early July we will be embarking on a three-month long expedition. Together we will be taking photographs with film cameras and I will be making small painted studies of the landscapes. Landscapes so vast that the mark made by human life is slight or non-existent.
The road less travelled
Leaving early July 2023, from our home in Fish Hoek on the South Peninsular of False Bay, Cape Town we will drive north, up the western part of South Africa to the Namibian border, through Namibia up to the Caprivi Strip and into Zambia.
From there we will explore the west of Zambia and then the Lower East side into the Luangwa valley, before driving onto lower Lake Tanganyika. Crossing into Malawi, travelling down along the lake and into Zimbabwe we will head for the Mana Pools and take a ferry along Lake Kariba to Mlibizi near Victoria Falls.
If all goes well we then enter Botswana and drive down via Kasane through the Delta to Maun, after which we will go to Gaborone and into South Africa via Augrabies Falls and back home to Fish Hoek.
An off-road vehicle with a roof top tent will be our home for the duration of the trip.
It is in wild and remote places that I find inspiration for my work.
It is when I am away from the noise of densely populated urban centers, in the wilderness that I experience the vastness of the universe and both the absolute insignificance and yet simultaneously the great significance each one of us has in this life. It brings me closer to the sublime and a sense of the strange intercourse between this life and what’s next. It is through holding on to the thread of these experiences that I begin my creative process, whereby I try to transpose the feeling of awe that I have experienced into something tangible.
It is my hope that perhaps these objects I make will in their turn, in some small way, communicate to others this experience of awe and wonder.
As expressed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, even if it is just one person at a time, who shares this experience through my work, becomes inspired, it may in its own small way, make the world a better place. Each individual person is like a seed falling onto the surface of water creating a wave that ripples out with each crest reaching a little further.
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