CURRICULUM VITAE + JOURNEY FRAGMENTS 

I am a social sculpture practitioner, eco-social activist, author, and inspirer working internationally.

My practice includes more than sixty actions, performances, site works, installations, and large-scale participatory social sculpture projects, as well as curatorial practice, mentoring, designing and facilitating connective practice programs, authoring several books and essays, many keynote lectures, public seminars, and an interdisciplinary, connective aesthetics methodology.

I was born on 21 December, 1950, in Bloemfontein, in Apartheid South Africa. I am currently based in Oxford, UK and Leipzig, Germany. I studied Installation, Performance and Aesthetics at the University of Cape Town [Undergraduate and Postgraduate, 1972] and was a postgraduate student at Hamburg University in 1974/5 working with ‘objects to use’ artist, Franz Erhard Walther, the new music composer, Gerhard Ruhm and the seminars of Nelson Goodman and Jurgen Habermas.

I was a master student of Joseph Beuys from 1973-75 and collaborated with him for more than a decade in his Free International University. [See material in REFLECTIONS including Beuys in Hessen text, In Soul Contact text, 100 days Beuys video or PRACTICE in Social Sculpture Frameworks: University of the Trees]

My work in grassroots organisations in South Africa in the late 1970s and 80s connected my social sculpture explorations with the cooperative movement, with the ecofeminism of Val Plumwood, with Paulo Freire’s ‘education for democracy’ and on an interdisciplinary masters program, exploring Ngugi wa Thiongo’s ‘Decolonizing the Mind’.

As Director of the Social Sculpture Research Unit [link to FRAMEWORKS category] at Oxford Brookes University from 1997-2018, and Professor of Social Sculpture & Interdisciplinary Arts (since 2019 Professor Emerita) I initiated and led many of my own and collaborative social sculpture projects and developed radical undergraduate, master’s & doctoral programs in Social Sculpture & Connective Practice with a focus on the inner dimension of transformative action.

I am currently working on projects, curating programs, mentoring, writing, and enabling exchanges that scale out my moral imagination methods and Connective Practice Approach. I contribute to the global Social Sculpture Lab work in several countries, including the Netherlands, India, Brazil, Wales, and Germany.

In 2021 I curated the 100-day Kassel-21 Social Sculpture Lab for the Joseph Beuys 100 Centenary, hosted by the documenta Archive and the Neue Galerie, Kassel. The lab included a focus on my ‘Connective Practice Approach’, several ‘instruments of consciousness’ and a Survival Room alongside Beuys’ ‘The Pack’ in the Neue Galerie, Kassel. My most recent project in the University of the Trees / Social Sculpture Lab framework is the 7000(+) HUMANS Global Social Forest.

Arising from years of exploration, making work, lecturing, exchanges and teaching in many countries and contexts, and inspired by proposals and practices in the fields of social sculpture, education for democracy, the poetic dimension, moral imagination, listening practices, ecological-social movements, philosophies of freedom, responsibility and agency, mindfulness, and cultural-political interventions, I have developed the Connective Practice Approach which offers interdisciplinary creative strategies and insights into transformative practice and ways that might contribute to shaping a viable eco-social future.

These “social aesthetic strategies for a change of heart” are integral to all my projects, research, pedagogic practice and interventions enable people to become creative agents of inner and outer change. All my practice emphasises that ‘every human being is an artist’ and offers approaches to moral imagination and ‘inner technologies’ to shaping a humane and ecologically viable future.

CV’s for different purposes.
Professional and Research CV - Detailed List
One page narrative CV
Narrative CVs - varying lengths.

Fragments about aspects of my journey are below in: Working with Questions, Liberating Pedagogies, and Landings

Encounters with inspirational teachers and teachings are in STREAMS OF INFLUENCE.

  • Driven by questions
    All my work has been driven by questions. The experiments and changes of directions are an attempt to engage with and respond to political, philosophical, spiritual, social, aesthetic questions that don't leave me. I am in the process of mapping these questions and the trajectories that have opened up.

    Methodology for working with questions
    One focus of my work has been to fid ways to share the connective practices I've developed for working with questions. These practices open up new ways of engaging with contextual and undiscovered issues, and working-together with questions. 'Working with questions' is central to Connective Practices like the 7000 HUMANS, Global Social Forest; Landing Strip for Souls and Earth Forum.

    Poetic text on 'Working with Questions'
    My text 'The Land of Questions' in ATLAS of the Poetic Continent: Pathways to Ecological Citizenship -illuminates something of the centrality of 'working with questions' in my life and work.

    A child in Apartheid South Africa
    This TEDX talk reveals a major source of these questions in my early childhood in South Africa. The kitchen was an arena where witnessing conflicting world views became questions and torments that still compel and drive me.

    Listen to TEDx talk

  • TheConnective Practice Approach articulates and enables the role of imagination in transformation across disciplines and in many contexts and spheres of activity.

    It includes a wide range of social aesthetic and creative strategies that I've developed over the years informed by my active 'work with questions' and contexts, as well as by inspirers from psychology, art, philosophy and education like Paulo Freire. Since the mid 1970s they have formed the basis of and have been further developed in diverse and challenging situations:
    1. In South Africa -in the 1970's and 80s in the branch of the Free International University- in attempts to work with the social sculpture ideas linked to education for democracy, in the Non-Formal Education programs I did with gangs, and through ZAKHE, the organisation developed to offer skills for cooperative development.
    2. In the UK from 1992-1997, where I developed an interdisicplinary program at Nottingham Trent University. This program provided a basis for taking people into new experimental, transdisciplinary and eco-social territory, inspiring and liberating students of the arts from traditiona disciplinary divisions. One specific and very popular program was Art and Healing, open to students from across the university. The work was often profound and highlighted how people from non-art backgrounds could focus on the imaginal mode in the field of transformation.

    In 1997 I was offered the opportunity to develop 'new art programs for the 21 century' at Oxford Brookes University. This led to a Bachelors in Contemporary Arts that foregrounded 'creative strategies', an understanding of the 'aesthetic dimension' in all areas of life, and experimentation in all 'materials' - from dialogue processes and organisational structures to food cultures as well as more traditional forms like film, writing, or video - as the basis for a interdisciplinary, transdisiplinary and eco-social practice. It included the Art and Healing program, Interventions, and new collaborations in Art and Music. At the same time I created a new interdisciplinary Masters program that led to the Master program and Doctoral research opportunities in Social Sculpture and Connective Practice.

    The incredible success of all these programs was recognised in many ways: through outside examiners, the Arts Council of England, keynote conference contributions, but above all by the many students who described them as 'life changing'.

    The Social Sculpture Research Unit -launched in 1998 enabled these social sculpture and connective practice pedagogies to be researched and reflected upon in the university and beyond.

    What these pedagogies were and how they worked is the subject of a book in progress.

  • 'Landing Strip for Souls' is a social sculpture-connective practice for uncovering and entering the various 'landings' in one's life.

    In Streams of Influence I map landings with some of my teachers. Understanding these landings are part of my inner curriculum vitae. So too are the questions, challenges, insights and opportunities offered by other encounters: through dreams, contexts, places, families, friends, writing, music, other cultural expressions, theories, ideologies, technologies and the art world. These have also been important landing places for my soul.

    I am in the process of mapping these inner landings and the insights that grew from them. Some still need attention and revisiting.

    Reentering and making sense of these landings in the present is part of my expanded art practice. In time they will be shared here.