Splendid ordinariness and the magic of print

A MAN SITS casually but alert in an improvised barber’s chair. He and the barber behind him focus on an unseen mirror and that look they have conjures up the whole context of having your hair cut. This is arguably as iconic Dorothy Kay’s 1953 self-portrait of the […]

Grandma’s closets, ransacked

YOU MIGHT BE urged to giggle at a chap made of an old rusted colander and some cotton reels, or a female angel with fish bones as wings, mooted ‘fish wife’, considering the gesture to be comic, perhaps for children. But when you engage closer with the body […]

Teapot architecture with whimsy and principles

A MIX OF unadulterated capriciousness, fragility that makes you frightened to breathe too hard counterpoised with functional robustness, and a storytelling quirkiness that shimmers, not to mention monumentality to make you laugh: this is what you get to experience with the work of potter Carolyn Heydenrych. Over 30 […]

Desperately seeking Kitty

WHEN YOU ENTER the theatre, you might be full of frissons of excitement contingent on the promises of Fire and Ice, the name of this double bill danced by Joburg Ballet. As the works unfold, you might feel oddly let down. At best, the ice you will experience […]

Lessons of letting go

HOW DO YOU make sense of loss? It’s a relentless pit of remorse and unspoken words, of perhaps guilt and ‘should haves’.  It is an uncertain place of not knowing how your absent person would have responded to a given situation. It is in this morass of confused […]