Artwork
Gentle warning: Here be nudity!
Love and Longing 2019
Waking Mage 2019
Oh No-pium 2020
Away with the Fae 2020
The Nook 2019
Player One 2019
Park Brawl Boys 2020
Writing
Gentle warning: Here be sensitive content!
Saudade
Saudade is a personal anthology of short stories
and journal entries. Many of the stories are inspired by dreams,
which have always been vivid and feature-length. Other stories are
typed from the pages of personal journals, jotted down over the
years. Some are born from a mere flicker of inspiration which burnt
out before they grew into something more. But through all of them is
woven the theme which ties them all together: "saudade" or, in other
words,
a sad state of intense longing for someone or something that is
absent.
Within this collection is
Stoicism and Midnight Swims, a story about a young woman
who goes night-swimming in the rock pools by the ocean, and finds
herself being watched by her university philosophy tutor;
Bitter Sangria, a journal entry detailing the first real
heartbreak after a several week long, international love across
countries; Cherub, a novella about two university friends
who make a deal with some devils to reach true Nirvana in the Old
Wing, currently under restoration;
Graves for the Hands You Can't Hold , a short horror story
about the woods behind a guest house and the shallow graves found
there without bodies.
Each story is accompanied by artwork and illustration, and notes
which give insight into their respective origins and inspirations.
Succubus
Succubus tells the story of Suda, a solitary girl
who sees the typical challenges of teenage life through an atypical
lens. As Suda performs in her waking life the milestones of
adolescence and adulthood - making friends, going to parties,
falling in love and lust - each thought, feeling and experience
filters through to settle onto her subconscious, where it blooms
into life. After a difficult move Suda makes a new friend, one she
feels real, rare love for, but their relationship is shattered at
his birthday party, when he drunkenly confesses his love to her and
simultaneously gropes her (all while he believing her to be asleep).
He swears no memory of it, and Suda starts the new school year
ensconced in crystallised contempt. Only to learn that since
confronting him, Issei is dead.
Suda retreats into herself, a place where she can make sense of the
world and all its awe and horror. The novel swells with rich
dreamscapes, - of thick black pools with disembodied hands oozing
white, of tsunamis and lighthouses, of giant fish with weeping
mouths, of alabaster angels. Suda’s waking world is one familiar and
alien, whose era, cultures and context are unanchored, swaying and
merging like strands of kelp in a dense forest. In Suda’s world the
urban and the natural, the digital and the manual, the modern and
the timeless blend co- exist seamlessly. The characters are at once
completely real - their millennial confidences, insecurities, and
pretensions are immediately recognisable - but at the same time they
are mere cardboard characters, the background to the iridescent mind
of Suda. She is a character uniquely alone. It is a novel much like
an aquarium: water is ever-present, and while the body of it is
floating and dreamy, the edges are hard, defined, contained. This is
in essence a coming of age novel that explores identity, sex,
dreams, consent, betrayal and body horror. And seeping through every
page is water.
Primordial Soup
Primordial Soup is a raw and at times absurd
graphic novel about Ruth and her untreated depression. She's tried
to treat it, but she can't afford therapy and the medication gives
her night terrors and vertigo. So she tries to soldier on and not
acknowledge it too much, not let it show, for fear of being a burden
to her family. But for Ruth, things are hanging on by a very thin
thread.
Cape Town is a beautiful but brutal city, full of opportunity but
only behind an enormous pay-wall. At 27 she is working three jobs,
all demeaning, while still relying on her aging father to help with
rent. All her friends are in the same boat and wrestling with their
own mental health crises, often exacerbating already strained
relationships. Her boyfriend is sweet but doesn't get it, and when
her career break finally arrives, in an exciting new country, he
tells her he needs "to figure himself out on his own". She gets
ready to give it all up for something more, but when her plans fall
away, she has nothing left to give. And it all takes place during a
deadly pandemic and the sixth mass extinction.
So she decides
to return the sea. She withdraws all her life savings (all R4 200 of
it) and, after neatly packing away her belongings, takes a trip to
Laangebaan to spend a solo weekend. Not fully committed to dying,
she takes a deep dive and stays there a while, and becomes a fish.