A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts (History of Art) by coursework and research report March 2017 / In the 1960s and 1970s, farm worker Nukain Mabuza created a painted hillside rock garden on a farm between Barberton and Kaapmuiden, Mpumalanga, South Africa. He transformed his dwellings, and rearranged and painted the surrounding rocks according to a unified scheme of geometric and animal motifs with a carefully selected colour palette. This altered environment went far further aesthetically, and lasted far longer in time, than the signs and scars that might typically result from a farm worker’s dwelling upon the land. His work arguably bears some of the hallmarks of an inhabited ‘total work of art’. I challenge the dominant ‘outsider art’ explanatory framework adopted by JFC Clarke and re-evaluate the fragmentary archive of Mabuza’s life and work. Working from the likelihood that no single context will offer sufficient grounds for situating Nukain Mabuza’s particular creative practice, I assess the relevance of cultural, historical and religious contexts, which might have shaped Nukain Mabuza’s personal vision and contributed to the form of his expressive environment. Nukain Mabuza’s altered landscape has suffered considerable damage – there is no longer any trace of the two dwellings and the stile, and the paintings on the rocks have all but disappeared. My project seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Nukain Mabuza’s work by extending, analysing, interpreting and situating his inhabited painted environment within the worldview of southern African Bantu-speakers, as a unique personal creative expression, and as an expression of the artist’s modernity. / MT2018

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Film and Television, August 2017 / Located in the town of Nieu Bethesda in the Karoo desert, the Owl House is a fascinating heritage museum that was once the home to outsider artist, Helen Martins. Much work has been created about the eccentric Helen Martins and her unusual home, and appears in the form of books, films, music and plays. The content of these works follow a similar pattern, and it is the aim of this research and film to explore a less literal interpretation of the Owl House, and its creators, Helen Martins and Koos Malgas. The Owl House is re-imagined through the lens of an experimental essay film, juxtaposing footage of the creative eastern imagery of the Owl House (in South Africa) with actual footage of the east (India, Thailand and Laos). In exploring these binaries, an investigation of theory of the landscape, home, mobility and hermeneutics takes place. Furthermore, these theories and concepts are looked at in relation to the politics of an apartheid, and later, a democratic South Africa. The Owl House is therefore analysed as the collaboration of the white, female Helen Martins, and the coloured, male Koos Malgas. / XL2018