As a child growing up in Africa, in what is now Zimbabwe, I was fascinated by the transition in the earth as we travelled from the blond and bleached sand veld of our home to the brilliant red earth of the fertile farmlands surrounding the capital.

The sun was always low by the time our journey was ending so the farmlands formed a nimbus of copper-red around the city’s fiery-red, window-eyed highrises. This red seeped into the cracks in the heels of gardeners, ran up the white walls of homes where creatures left blood-earth stained tracks and drifted heavily in rivers during the rainy season.

Many years later a friend discovered some artifacts in the archives of the city’s museum. These were androgynous figurines—just torsos, with no arms, large buttocks, small breasts—made from this same red earth albeit now darkened to a bright liver color. This discovery inspired a series of paintings linking these figurines to the essence of the earth their anonymous creators inhabited.

A hemisphere away from my homeland during Covid, when humanity’s significance in the natural world order seemed to me low, I revisited this theme linking humanity to the essence of the earth we inhabit. This enquiry combined with my deepening yoga practice produced a collection of work that pulses from the cellular/atomic level to the infinite. The eye-filling red of my childhood threads its way back, leaving its mark by returning my aesthetic soul to the earth I inhabit.