My Latest Series: “Stone, Steel and Glass”

This is a series I've completed featuring “urban abstract” landscapes and architecture that make for interesting art. The six-piece set focuses on the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (MOCAA) in Cape Town's Waterfront precinct. This museum and the Silo Hotel above it were built into an old grain silo that has been modernized and given a unique look with faceted windows. I was drawn to the contrasting textures in the building - stone-like concrete, smooth metal and reflective glass, that interplay to form a diamond-like beacon in the landscape (Image credit: John Golby Fine Art).

But what really did it for me while photographing it that Sunday morning was turning around and being stunned by its perfect, patterned reflection in the glass building next door. This series is the result - a truly material abstraction of the physical and functional museum building, made up of lines, squares, triangles, trapezoids, ovals and cylinders, blended with some of the interior of the mirror facade. While looking into one building, you're overwhelmed by the other, and the converging window lines lend a sense of vertigo. This series explores the experience of kenopsia - the strange feeling we get in normally busy places when there’s nobody about - that these liminal spaces can evoke.

It’s often struck me how so many people are turned off by the use of concrete, steel and glass in architecture, preferring “natural” materials instead. The thing is, steel is one of the most basic materials we get from the earth, it’s basically iron. And glass is molten sand. As for concrete - 80% of it is stone, sand and water. And the cement that binds it together, making up the remaining 20%, is mainly limestone and clay that have been kiln-heated. These materials are as primitive and simple as traditional bricks.