She won all her school prizes for words.

Highest marks in English. Highest marks in Afrikaans. Twelfth in South Africa in the Anglo-De Beers English Olympiad. She matriculated from Northlands Girls' High in 1986 with the Gardyne and the Adeline Slatter trophies, and every one of them was for language.

Then she went to Pietermaritzburg and read Fine Arts.

The words never entirely left. Her work has since appeared in poetry anthologies about as often as in photography ones, and her titles have always done more work than titles usually do. But somewhere between the last English prize and the first year of an art degree, she chose making the image over describing it.

Pietermaritzburg

She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg in 1990, and was a semi-finalist that year for the Swan Young Artist Award. Her work went into the award catalogue, the first time anything she made was printed and handed to strangers.

In 1991 she took a Higher Diploma in Education in Durban. In the same year she exhibited in New Signatures at the NSA Gallery in Overport.

Those two facts, sitting side by side in the same year, turn out to be the shape of her whole working life. The teaching and the making have never been separate. They have taken turns.

In 1992 her work appeared in Havoc, the poetry and art journal of the University of Natal. Words and pictures in the same binding again.

Durban in the nineties

She showed at the Durban Arts Festival at the Cecil Renaud Gallery in 1993 and again in 1994, and at the Volkskas Atelier at the NSA Gallery in the same year.

In 1994 she also stood in front of a room of art teachers for the Natal Education Department and presented Styles of Architecture in Durban: Learning through Looking. It was an early version of the thing she has done ever since, which is to make people slow down and look properly at what is already in front of them.

Looking hard at the buildings on her own doorstep took her further than expected. In July 1995 Alan Powers invited her to present at the World Congress of Art Deco in London. She was twenty-six.

Twenty-four thousand miles

The other thing that happened in 1995 is that she got into a van in America and drove twenty-four thousand miles.

It was a photographic expedition and it took a year. She has worked that way since: go, look, keep moving, do not sit waiting for the light to arrive.

By 1996 she was exhibiting in Mediatek: All Things Digital at the NSA Gallery. Digital work, in Durban, in 1996, when the equipment was poor and nobody had settled whether any of it counted as art.

1999

Then came 1999, when a decade's worth of work seemed to land in a single year.

Vinyl Diamonds, her solo exhibition, at Red Eye @rt at the Durban Art Gallery. Blur, with Langa Magwa and Kevin Payne, at the NSA Gallery on Bulwer Road. The Past Graduate exhibition at the Jack Heath Gallery in Pietermaritzburg. A Public Hanging of Thumbnails, shown twice, at Beanbag Bohemia and again at Red Eye. 3 Durban Photographers at Wicked Pixels in Cape Town, the first time her work travelled to this side of the country. Freak for Sheet at Cuban Pete's on Stamford Hill Road. And Alien's Flamenco, a 16mm music film, which she produced and directed.

Two books carried her work that year: Collaborations: A Book of South African Art and Poetry, edited by Chari Fregona for umSinsi Press, and 100XC: Photography in South Africa, edited by Gabriella Kaplan for UCT Press.

In the same year she founded Wavelength Productions, the photographic business she ran for the next eight years.

The entries that are not exhibitions

Two lines sit in her CV among the exhibitions, filed with everything else, that are not exhibitions at all.

2000: Birth of Jasper James Gaylard, St Dominic's, East London. She gave it three exclamation marks.

2003: Birth of Cassidy Raine Gaylard, Kingsway.

She has never moved them out of that list, and there is no good reason to move them now. They belong where she put them.

2005

2005 was her fullest year.

She was in the Cape Town Month of Photography twice over: Girls Night Out at the Joao Ferreira Gallery, curated by Tracy Gander, and Sex, Love and Suicide at the Shot Gallery, curated by Tamlyn Martin. She was in Paper-Works at the NSA Gallery, in Red Eye Meets DCC25 Urban Edge at the Durban City Hall, and in Red Eye Intersect at the Durban Art Gallery.

That year she also made Only Carbon Arrows and Bullet Points: the Target Series, shown at Bean Bag Bohemia on Windermere Road. It combined photography, oil painting and beadwork, the beadwork made to her designs by the beaders of St Agnes Anglican Church in Kloof. She did not make it alone and it was never meant to look as though she had.

Her work appeared in the Cape Town MOP catalogue published by Bell-Roberts, and Sandra Klopper wrote about it in Art South Africa in the Winter 2005 issue.

Fifteen years of other people's work

In 2007 she closed Wavelength and joined Eden College in Durban, where she stayed for fifteen years.

It is not a gap in the record so much as a period when her hands were in somebody else's work. She had done it twice before: she rebuilt the art department at Northlands Girls' High from nothing in 1992, taking over from a teacher of thirty-five years, and established a new one at Maris Stella in 1996 on her return from America.

What came out of the Eden years hung on other people's walls. Her learners exhibited at the KZNSA gallery in 2018 and 2019. Simran Singh was the only child in South Africa chosen for the Association of Women World Leaders of Monaco exhibition, Draw Me a World, and the resulting book went to the Palace. Dorina Cherneva won the MathArt competition and her work toured to Linz. Kamira Naidoo's work was published in Jonathan Jansen's Learning Under Lockdown.

Fifteen years is a long time to point the lens at somebody else's work. She has spent a while picking her own back up.

Now

She lives in Fish Hoek, on the far side of the country from where most of that happened, where the mountain comes down to the sea at the end of the road.

She is photographing this coast. Kalk Bay. Simon's Town. The places she drives past.

She is painting in watercolour and in oil, drawing, cutting linocuts and making ceramics.

The work is made here and it has travelled. It has hung in Durban and Cape Town, been published in Cape Town and London, and taken her from a lecture room at the World Congress of Art Deco to twenty-four thousand miles of American road. It now goes out from Fish Hoek to wherever it is bought.

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