Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 114-117). / At a dinner party in Durban after the opening of Come, a 2007 exhibition of Michaelis MFA students, a woman asked me about my work. When I told her it was "the bullets", by way of description (One Hundred Bullets With Your Name On Them), she said something along the lines of "oh, that's so fascinating, I really had thought a man had made them".

Includes bibliographical references.

Native Work is an installation-artwork consisting of 38 portrait photographs. It was made in response to an encounter with the archive of Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin’s photographs of black southern Africans taken between 1919 and 1939. In its creative focus on traditional black South African culture in a post-apartheid context, Native Work is one of a series of related - but independent - projects occurring contemporaneously with it in the city of Cape Town (a situation examined more closely in the conclusion to this document: see p. 33). Native Work is motivated by a desire for social solidarity - a desire which emerges as a particular kind of historical possibility in the aftermath of apartheid. As such, it finds inspiration in Duggan-Cronin’s commitment to affirm the lives of those black South Africans who many of his peers would have dismissed as unworthy subjects of such attention. Native Work echoes that commitment by staying close to an impulse of tenderness discernible in Duggan-Cronin’s life-long project, and pays homage not only to Duggan-Cronin, but also to the expressive life of those who appeared in his work.

This body of work is comprised of individual pieces that differ in media and scale, forming a series of linked and related encounters. All the works find their origin in an eighteen-month period of living on a hospital ship in West Africa, and the story of this time forms the basis of this book. In addition the intense and emotional experience of caring for a friend in the last few weeks of her life brought into focus thoughts of living and dying that seemed to be reflected in much of what I encountered on board. This book is a reflection of both my working process and the experiences, images and ideas that gave rise to it. I have tried to present the ambiguities of 'the ship', the paradoxes it embodies and its source as the inspiration for my work while at the same time hinting at its rich resonance in terms of both maritime histories and the literature it has generated.

Includes bibliography. / This thesis examines the University of Cape Town (UCT) Permanent Works of Art Collection in order to determine its relevance to, and status within, the university. The text traces the historical and current roles of the university art collection in general, before focusing specifically on the UCT art collection’s history, including the contexts, events and personalities which shaped its development, from its embryonic beginnings in 1911, to the present. In an era which demands clear correlations between the allocation of resources and relevance to institutional goals, the contemporary university collection is under pressure to demonstrate its potential as a useful educational and interpretive tool within the university (the so-called ‘triple mission’ of collections: teaching, research and public display), or risk being consigned to obsolescence, even destruction. Based on a survey of the UCT art collection’s holdings, interviews, and a combination of bibliographic and archival research, undertaken between 2011and 2014, the thesis establishes that, whereas most university collections were traditionally constituted for the purpose of teaching and research, or for the preservation and exhibition of historical artefacts pertaining to a university and/or a specific discipline, this collection does not precisely fulfill either function.

Includes bibliographies. / This body of work is an experiential study which aims primarily to investigate the effect of the Western medical anatomisation of myself - the cancer patient - on and through my artmaking. The dissertation aims to contextualise my practice - to situate it somewhere between the different readings of cancer according to the Western theory of disease, the Eastern and New Age understandings of the body and ill health, and the work of other artists. It seeks balance between these competing discourses and looks for integration through them. The responses of other artists to their ill bodies are described, several of them exploiting medical technology, others subverting the language of the dominant discourse and the image of the 'good' patient with a 'bad' body. My own work attempts to make art around and out of the experience of cancer. The artmaking is an attempt to gather an understanding of my condition and to integrate art and life. The challenge is to visually represent this. I began the work with an ambivalence - was I an activist helping others, or was I merely immersed in my own struggle to maintain sanity, to reach a peace with my body, a calm space from which to deal with my condition? I have dismissed this ambivalence and settled on the latter position, which has the indirect effect of helping others. I have realized, like Jo Spence, that it is easy to burn yourself out when you work from a position of anger. Art and science have exploited and depicted the body throughout their history, sometimes in ways that overlap, sometimes at cross purposes that conflict, and sometimes in mutually supportive ways. When examining the binaries of revealing and concealing, visibility and invisibility, legibility and illegibility, one cannot avoid a conflict with the medical system. However, through the excavation of my body by modern medical technology, I have evolved from previously seeing only the horror of a tumour to now also seeing the hidden beauty of the other landscapes inside my body. My artmaking is thus taken up as a personal issue, not attempting to shock or to be placatory, but to externalize the cancer experience and, rather than simply reacting to it, to find the beauty inside my body.

Includes bibliographical references. / In order to meet the requirements for the MFA degree at the University of Cape Town I proposed to create a body of sculptures based on studies initiated during my year of study for the Advanced Diploma in Art at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. These studies involved the observation and formal analysis of certain functional structures relating mostly to industry, and led to the making of sculptures characterised by formal reduction and abstracted 'constructivist' forms. My intention for the MFA study was to pursue this methodology and to extend the scope to include architectonic elements relating to both interior and exterior structures and spaces, as well as other objects such as machines. My source material was largely taken from 19th-century technical illustrations of industrial machinery for the reason that the functions of the chosen mechanical structures were overtly expressed by the constituent parts, which became the compositional elements of my sculptural abstractions.

My project is an exploration of process within the painting medium, themed round my experiences of 'self' and community, as located in my past and present circumstances. Throughout my work, my intention has been to explore my social, personal and political 'beliefs' in order to create a body of paintings that both reflects and challenges my 'belief' structures. In my work there are contradictory desires for change and stability, and an ongoing struggle between location and dislocation.

Bibliography: leaves. 114-117. / In June this year I read an article entitled Eve's footprints safe in museum (Cape Times 24.6.98). The footprints had just been removed from the shore of the Langebaan lagoon. The footprints, imprinted in stone, have been dated to 117 000 years. The media use of the name Eve is an example of how theoretical possibility can become popular fact. The prints became exposed when the stone happened to crack and slide off along the strata that held the prints. Exposed to the elements and to a public who want to have their photograph taken standing where Eve once stood, the soft sandstone which held such a transient impression began to deteriorate rapidly. An article earlier in the year reported on the debate around the future of the prints. The geologist David Roberts, who discovered the prints, wanted them removed as soon as possible while Dr. Janette Deacon from the National Monuments Council was reported to have said, "We should rather see it preserved at the site as moving it would destroy a lot of its meaning. A museum display could never recreate the atmosphere of that scene" (Cape Times 14.1.98).

Concentrating on the object as vestige of function in the portrayal of muses in ancient Greek sculpture, my aim is to dismiss their traditional representations, and to reconstruct the choir of the muses by iconographic substitution. The hypothesis is that if the muses are prototypes rather than personages, then mythic meaning will survive its own dislocation and continue to function in substitute form, giving the resulting sculptures symbolic impetus.