On a walk one day, I picked up a dead sparrow. It was so exquisitely beautiful, that I simply had to immortalize it in some way. This was the start of a series of ‘dead bird works’ in a variety of media. For me, the little corpses have become symbolic of the many beautiful and precious things in our country that have been destroyed during recent years as a result of greed, corruption, ineptitude, and more recently, the lockdowns. This image shows a robin from Pretoria which contains Job 14-26
In my opinion, a ‘copy-and-paste method would not adequately convey complexity, and for this reason, I create images of natural organisms that each contain an entire book, or a portion of, a book of Scripture. The images are created by typing the words letter by letter, in Photoshop. As I go along, I sample the colors from the reference image. I deliberately try to limit my own interpretation, in order to let the natural design speak for itself.
