A little background

I was born and raised in Africa, and although I have travelled the world, my blood is saturated with the dust of this incredible continent. The Great Zimbabwe Ruins was my playground as a kid. Without any understanding, I grew to love the organic nature of the creative design of the Shona people. 

 

However, I was raised in the strict traditions of the Afrikaner people, rooted in the meticulous ways of the Dutch and German culture. At first I found these philosophies to be at total odds with one another. But with maturity, my creative expression was formed by a marriage between the two.

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Creative development

My love for God's creation was stimulated from a young age. Africa, with her variety of textures, shapes, smells and forms, became embroidered in my art.

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I found that this creative gift could not be satisfied by painting in one genre, nor could it be contained in one medium. Thus I started experimenting with painting techniques, different media, with pottery, sculpture, architecture and something I call "functional sculpture". This lead to the design of bathroom fixtures which were functional, yet bordered on the genre of sculpture.

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First bathroom design

When I started working with my friend and fellow sculptor, Freddy Peens, on the first bathroom, I encountered the question: "Why, in the privacy of your own bedroom, do you need a private bathroom? I designed a bath that would be incorporated as a feature piece in the middle of the bedroom.

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I used the chevron design elements of the outside walls of the 'temple' at the Zimbabwe Ruins, and incorporated them with textures that I had developed in my paintings.

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With the idea of marrying my germanic culture with the African culture, we furthermore researched medieval metal working techniques. Sheet metal was created by forming molten iron into a ball. This ball was then hammered into long rods. The rods were then plated  and then hammered and into a sheet. Sheets were fused together with studs. This information was used in the design.

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Our creative expression opened the idea of having molten faces pushing through the metal surface.

 

Medium

When we started working on the concept, the medium was one of the greatest issues.  Our research lead us to a technique of the cold casting of aluminum. This medium was rigorously tested and passed with flying colors.

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Other Applications

The versatility of the medium allowed us to expand our thoughts into a variety of ways:

• Sculptures

• Wall tiles

• Cladding

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Themed Hotel Applications 

Bathrooms

I would love the opportunity of working with an architectural and design team to develop a unique style of bathrooms, in which a bath similar  to the one displayed above could be used for the suites. A series of legs, featuring any subject could make the suites individually unique.

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The bulk of the rooms would feature a built in bath, which would be much less expensive to produce, but would still retain the same design elements. A series of tiles can be designed  featuring the same style.

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Cladding

Getting back to medieval sheet metal. Imagine, if you will, a building with parts being held together with enormous sheets of hammered metal, held together with massive brass studs. This would allow for a repetition of the medium, and a flow of style from the sculpture stampede into the building and extending into the privacy of the bathrooms.

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Sculptures

Freddy and I stuck out our necks to produce a model of a Mara River crossing featuring 64 wildebeest and one crocodile. Although the product we have produced is already very effective, we plan to include zebra, a lion kill and a warthogg peering out of a hole in a termite mound.