Emerging Artist

Synaesthesia 1: Speak, Wind

The series explores synaesthesia – the blending of senses - through an enforced stillness that generates noise.

Strauss & Co.2025

Numbered 1/5

Photograph on Felix Schoeller True Fibre 200gsm

94,5 by 128,5 by 5cm

Synaesthesia 1: Listen, Midnight

The photographs are shot on 47 year-old expired B&W film with a simple point and shoot Pentax. The expired film conceptually links to noise - ‘noise’ is more often used to explain unwanted imperfections. The exaggerated grain is a contrast to today’s hyper-real digital images. Software like Photoshop, AI, and digital manipulation tools want us to clean up images. Here, the grain invites the viewer to lean in, to hear the wind speak, to listen to the sounds of midnight insects that tremor nighttime leaves, to imagine the murmurs of early spring flowers pushing through loam.

Synaesthesia I: Murmur, Spring

Printed A0, the size disorientates the viewer experience; from a distance the visual is easy to understand, but up close the grain overwhelms, creating an abstract pattern. The black-and-white palette pushes the multi-sensory imagination, too. The viewer is free to assign their own colour and sensory, synaesthetic smash-up.

The Circus Horse, 2025

Cirque de Zavvata, Bretagne, France, 2008

It’s 2008. A circus pony goes round in circles. And again. The photograph, shot seventeen years ago and printed in 2025, closes the gap between then and now. The pony is stuck in the eternal instant. The audience applauds.

My mom and I were in France on a riding holiday, exercising thoroughbreds in the mornings, and wandering around the chateau grounds and nearby village in the afternoon. For over three hundred years, French artists have documented the circus; the list includes Degas, Renoir, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Chagall with his famous ‘Le Cirque’ series.

Nouveau Cirque Zavatta arrived one Tuesday afternoon during our holiday. Working with limited means – a Kodak disposable camera, no flash, too much movement – meant the light inside the tent was out of my control. It works though, capturing the scruffiness and low-fi wonder of a regional circus.

Photography asks us to believe the image is true, that every captured moment in time is de facto. But the circus is about illusions, as is photography. In this performance the circus pony had been gussied up to resemble a small lion. The reframing pushes the entrapment further, confining the pony’s performance to another box. By printing and presenting it seventeen years later, the pony re-performs its routine, forever and ever.

Roan horse and mud (Blok submission).jpg

Grey Horse, Brown Mud,

Hout Bay, 2020

Roses & Tyres, Nairobi 2024

I: Orange & Yellow

II: White & Blue

III: Pink & Blue

Kenya was colonised by British Settlers in the late 1800 and early 1900s. They brought their gardens and roses, trying to inflict an English identity on African land. Because flowers grow from seeds, they are always connected to the first iteration. Many of Kenya's roses are natural heritage roses, as the genus has died out elsewhere.

Today, it is a thriving industry: Kenya makes up 16% of global flower trade, half of which are roses. Kenyans grow their own roses in any land, cultivated in the urban landscape, rugged and delicate at the same time. The photographs in the series were taken at a mechanic's shop in downtown city.