Practical Process & Workbook
Throughout my travels across South Africa—both in the bush-veld and within our urban and rural environments - I continuously collect samples of plants, leaves, and sculptural wood pieces from various species and trees. Many of these remain as natural sculptures, while others serve as the “canvas” for my encaustic paintings. Some wood pieces have survived fire damage in the bush, while others I have intentionally burned to reflect the “relics” of a burning biosphere and a scorched planet.
My work incorporates various mediums and disciplines, including performance art and encaustic painting. I begin by collecting wood forms, leaves, seed pods, and other organic materials in the bush-veld of Limpopo and the North West Provinces of South Africa. Foraging for beautifully gnarled, sculptural pieces of wood, I transform these into "canvases" for my encaustic paintings, These also contain ashes collected from the many veld and bush fires I have witnessed or encountered after their devastation. I split these pieces in half to create a flat surface and then craft encaustic painted and engraved “nature relic” sculptures by adding leaf skeletons, seed pods, and charcoal forms.
I have found nine old wood panels, which I burned to create charcoaled “canvases". Encaustic painting involves using an encaustic medium (a mixture of beeswax and dammar resin) mixed with pigment and fused with heat. Firstly, I melt the encaustic medium from a solid form into a pourable liquid in an electric wax melting pot. I use pre-prepared encaustic wax blocks as well as making my own medium, mixing 80% natural beeswax with 20% dammar resin. The next step is to create a smooth, primed surface by applying three to four layers of encaustic medium, fusing each layer with a heat gun to ensure adherence to the wood panel.
Once the surface is primed, I mix colour powder pigments with the encaustic wax medium in aluminium cups to begin the painting process. After each application of “paint,” I fuse each layer with heat to bond the entire piece together.
On some pieces, I add a shellac burn effect, which is a resin secreted by the female lac bug on trees in India and Thailand. Chemically, it consists mainly of aleuritic acid and other natural waxes. Processed and sold as dry flakes, it is dissolved in methylated spirits to create liquid shellac, which I brush onto the wax surface. When heat is applied, the shellac separates, creating fine “spidery” lines and forms that are integrated into my artwork. I also use image transfer techniques by burnishing printed images into the wax surface. I also have scored the wax with sculptural tools, applying oil paint into the recesses to highlight my symbolic mark-making.
