No description available.

No description available.

<p> I believe art can offer an antidote to our numbness and rekindle a sense of childlike wonder. Reclaiming Wonder is an installation in which I aim to explore the possibility of evoking the curiosity of childhood in the viewer&rsquo;s mind and transporting him or her into a dreamlike atmosphere to wander about in wonder through the use of the senses of sight, touch, and hearing.</p>

A collection of short stories / Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the locked Download file link and fill out the appropriate web form. / Free time and other stories / 2031-01-01

Bogasatswana: Rebuilding the Boat while Sailing, is an attempt to both transmit and disrupt a story-world whose make-up is based on my country of origin, Botswana. It is an exercise in worldbuilding through painting, wherein I establish post-colonial Botswana as a fictional place through the interrogation of gaps within the historicised national myths of the country and locate myself in said place and medium as a subject in the contemporary moment. Rather than the presentation of a fully realized fictional world, this project privileges the attempt at articulating a subjective world-version as informed by my positionality. As with solving a mathematical equation, I endeavour to show my working in the making visible of this space.

Abstract not available

abstract: A collection of six stories. Each story features a different cast of characters, ranging from high-school-aged girls to 70-year-old women in retirement communities. Most stories are told in the third-person limited point of view, and adhere to a traditional narrative structure, occasionally utilizing "found" text, such as letters and an entry in the DSM to advance plot and set the tone. This collection explores the lives of characters afraid to articulate their desires and unable to communicate as they grapple with loss, suicide, trauma, illness, and the dissolution of family. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.F.A. Creative Writing 2012

Includes bibliographical references. / Herschel resided in Cape Town until 1838. He set up a telescope in the orchard of their estate, Feldhausen, in Wynberg, and worked towards completing a systematic survey of the southern hemisphere for stars, nebulae and other celestial objects (Warner, 1996:55 & Buttmann, 1974:104). Herschel’s observations in the Cape were not only focused on astronomy. His scientific contributions included work in the fields of geology, meteorology and botany and this scope of diversity extended beyond the disciplines of science since he also pursued his interests in poetry, music and visual art (Buttmann, 1974:112 & Schaaf, 1989:10). Herschel played the flute and was also an avid draughtsman, evident in the extensive collection of sketches that he made of Cape botanicals and landscapes (Schaaf, 1989:10). In addition to these sketches, his diary entries from his stay in Cape Town, published in “Herschel at the Cape: diaries and correspondence of Sir John Herschel, 1834 to 1838” provide another affirmation of his variety of skills, since poetic descriptions and multi-sensory observations can be found amongst scientific and analytical inquiries. For example, in his diary entry March 1836 he commented on a nightjar’s song and included a music staff with an accurate notation of the bird’s melody. In a letter to William Henry Harvey in 1837 Herschel wrote about the scents of Cape flowers, applying perceptive metaphors for each flower species, such as cinnamon, pepper and ginger (Warner, 2011:34-35). He often created links between his observations from these different fields, such as applying his study of botany to that of photography by using Cape flower juices for photographic colour filters (Schaaf, 1992:98). The title of my MFA project references John Herschel as well as the Theme and Variation form in music in which a single musical theme, often written by a different composer, is followed by a series of developments of this theme through the employment of a range of compositional techniques (Lindsay, n.d.). The body of work that I created is structured according to this musical form. I used Herschel’s representations from and of the Cape as the basic theme which I then developed through a series of variations, employing media and methods across disciplines, time periods and sense modalities. By way of this process of mediation, the resulting art works become parallel records of my own specific experience of Cape Town.

Denotations of Memory: A Familial Archive is an evocative exploration of memory centred on a familial archive. Notions of memory as well the memories themselves in the archive are explored in the form of paintings, sculptures, photographs, installation and videos. A major part of this work focuses on living in Cape Town, South Africa, which was the central location of my lived reality while I was reflecting on the past as embodied in the familial archive.

Includes bibliographical references. / A history of failure implies several things. It can point to a chronology of the concept of failure, like so many contemporary history books that chart a minute aspect of culture. It could refer to a personal record, like a criminal having a history of violence. The implication is also there that history itself has failed to achieve, failed to describe, failed to move forward, failed to be history at all. History in this essay is not just the study of the past, but also its use in culture - to separate us from nature, to validate ideologies or to provide insight into our present. History in these terms is not a sequence of physical events, but the representation of these events. These representations exhibit curious behaviour: no matter their function they appeal to truth. History uses the language of the real to validate itself (Culler 2002: Kindle edition'), and this language is often constituted into narrative (which I will discuss in some detail later).