About the work
Reimagined Desires draws on memories of my childhood home in South Africa, reconstructing the domestic interior through tufted textile and ceramics, objects closely associated with this familiar setting, to confront shame, repression and inherited beliefs surrounding sexuality.
The central tufted work, Reimagined Desire, is based on a still of two closeted male lovers. Through secrecy, longing and intimacy, it reflects my ongoing process of challenging inherited shame and embracing an authentic life as a homosexual person.
Installed facing the church window, the work changes with the natural light. What was once hidden is gradually revealed, making light a metaphor for truth, intimacy and self-acceptance.
Ceramic works
Culture, inheritance and the male body
The ceramic works draw on ancient Greek visual culture and its representations of men, desire and sexuality. Their vessel-like forms carry this history into the installation while also recalling the decorative objects that populated my childhood home.
Placed beside the tufted textile, the ceramics connect my Greek inheritance to the domestic environment in which I grew up in South Africa. Together, the works transform the remembered home into a space where desire, cultural identity and personal history can be examined openly.
Lekythos of Desire
Lekythos of Desire is inspired by ancient Greek vessels, particularly the lekythos, an oil flask associated with both ritual and burial practices. This form was central to the care and preservation of the athletic male body in ancient Greece. Athletes rubbed oil onto their skin before exercising, and fine sand could then be applied for protection and to help wrestlers maintain their grip. Afterwards, the mixture of oil, sweat and dirt was removed using a strigil.
The imagery combines references drawn from ancient Greek visual culture with a contemporary bestiary image encountered in A Hard Man is Good to Find at The Photographers' Gallery, London. By bringing these bodies together into a vessel associated with masculinity, it connotes the celebrated athletic body with a more clandestine visual culture of male desire, asking how admiration and erotic attraction can be concealed within images publicly framed as history, sport or classical beauty.
Process and encounter
From making to exhibition
Tufting transforms a familiar domestic material into a space for confronting silence and vulnerability.
Photography and installation documentation, 2026