BREAKING #315 | TRAVEL DIARY

‘Are we nearly there?’

Nicole Ex

Column

April 2026

Nicole Ex

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

April 2026

So many impressions, so many people, so much nature, so much to think about. Travelling means physically straying from your path and inwardly losing your bearings. Your sense of time, direction and routine shifts. Your hardwiring begins to tremble loose. Anke was certain the moon was waning, probably because on this side of the equator it appears mirrored, when in fact it was waxing towards full.

Are We There Yet? is the title of a three-day performance centred on a new series of infectious textile works by Frances van Hasselt. ‘Are we nearly there?’ is the plea of children in the back seat, for whom the journey soon becomes too much. The semi-desert of the Karoo follows a different dramatic arc – time lies stacked in geological layers.*

Her whitewashed studio sits against the mountains. There is an old acacia tree in the forecourt, a wooden awning, and holes in the wall through which sparrows fly in and out. ‘I think about every detail, take care of every thread,’ she laughs, ‘and then suddenly I find it entirely negotiable that those birds come and shit all over the place.’

That live-and-let-live spirit runs through the work she makes with a team of local makers: pieces into which the colour and layers of the land are woven, but which above all radiate the pleasure of making, as well as humour and self-deprecation. They express themselves in mohair, soft and lustrous as silk when it comes from the hair of kid goats.

I cannot help drawing a comparison with the radical life and work of Georgia O’Keeffe in the unforgiving landscape of New Mexico: attuning oneself to a specific place and translating that into art simply produces the best kind of art. Yes, you can travel 13,000 kilometres to see this luminous place. Leaving it again is the painful part.

* Professor Bruce Rubidge, a palaeontologist who has been conducting research in the area for decades, explains during the gathering how the Karoo forms an exceptionally rich fossil record: from early land animals and reptilian ancestors to dinosaurs and the first mammals – a history that ultimately leads back to us. Humanity begins in Africa.