In 2017 the forest wildfires in Portugal claimed many lives and destroyed a warehouse containing most of my possessions, shipped from South Africa in 2016. Two weeks before, I had removed a single box of yarns, hoping to start an artwork. Uncannily, this only legacy remaining after a lifetime of collecting vintage textiles, threads, wools, artworks and household goods turned out to be the exact colours left behind by the fire — the burnt debris and ensuing rain yielding astonishing hues, seductive corrosive marks and congealed, contorted shapes.

Feeling compelled to express the ‘delightful horror’ of the disaster, I began knitting — with kebab sticks and reclaimed crochet hooks — contemplating the repercussions and trying to articulate some meaning about the event. The work was completed with knitting needles given by my daughter and a friend, and is presented in dialogue with site-specific relics from the inferno.

This metaphoric, site-specific work refers to the veiling of the cross during Lent, when Catholics symbolically enter the darkness of the tomb in recognition of Christ’s physical absence in the wilderness, before the celebration of the resurrection. It was made alongside Beyond an Inferno, from the same fire and the same salvaged yarns.

Shown in Edge (Fibreworks) at the KZNSA Gallery, Durban, 2019, and in Resiliência at Ponte d’Arte, Portugal, 2019.