Forest Ladder

Artist Biography 

Tracey Leigh Thoolen born in 1968 in Johannesburg, she first trained in spatial disciplines, completing a Bachelor of Science in Town and Regional Planning and a Master’s in Urban Design. That grounding in pattern, flow and place drew her back to art, where she earned a BA in Visual Arts from UNISA in 2024. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include the UNISA Gallery and The Viewing Room. She explores the dialogue between natural forms, liminality and layered mark-making . Working primarily in drawing and mixed media, she builds on subtle, organic images combining line, texture and translucency.

Artists Statement

Composite frames this exhibition in the rhythm of endings and beginnings. Working from a fallen log, dead matter fissured by time whose desiccated rings trapped ambient moisture, where the turkey tail fungi metabolised loss into renewal. I read surfaces as archives of time: crack, ring, spore, and traced textures and layered forms to show how endings created the conditions for beginning again. I argued that life and death were not opposites but coexistent states within a shared environment, where what disappeared nourished what emerged. Located in the intervals between erosion and renewal, stillness and proliferation, this composite exhibition treated “composite” as both process and ethic, a patient ecology of making in which death scaffolded life. I constructed layered surfaces using ink, bleach, recycled paper, graphite and stitched thread, employing mark making, stippling, stitching and bleach painting. Through these methods the materials recorded a passage from absence to presence, from ruin to renewal, while sustaining fragile yet enduring cycles across human and natural worlds.