Four Seasons, Spring, 2026

Maps, science fiction, magical realism, trees and forests, cross-pollination, roots, botanicals and the cultivation of beauty, post-planetary design, displacement, epidemic dissidence and game theory. These are some of the things that have accompanied me across oceans and cities, by land and by plane, and they found their way into the studio with me. I work as a travelling curator, writer and artist, moving through a tripartite scheme that forms and informs my praxis and my modes of thinking. Making this body of work was a form of catharsis, a space to test out and project my thoughts, intuitions and feelings into a visual field through material form. Music in the studio ran through most of the sessions, and something of its looseness settled into the marks.

The works hold these preoccupations loosely, the way a garden holds its seasons. Four Seasons, Summer burns through reds and yellows, its suns rising and setting inside the same frame. Earth reads like a green atmosphere crossed by flight paths and orbits, a planet seen from somewhere just outside it. ‘Tardigrade’, carries a fragment of a dictionary entry inside its cool blue field, the small indestructible creature becoming a way to think through survival and deep time. ‘Chemical Wedding’, gathers its alchemy from cross-pollination and transformation, botanical scribbles meeting geometric bodies. ‘Going Home’, saturates everything in a single magenta breath. Across all of them the recurring threads are maps and migration, forests and displacement, the pull between where one is and where one is from.

Monotype printmaking is systematic. Over the past two years I have studied that system closely, and I have kept asking how I might modify the process, expand the contours of the medium, and at times surpass them. There are collages from found materials as usual, material juxtapositions and ghost prints, second pulls that hold onto what the first impression left behind, which feels right for work so preoccupied with trace, residue and return.

Nkhensani Mkhari, 2026