In a murderous time

the heart breaks and breaks

and lives by breaking.

Stanley Kunitz, The Testing-Tree

My work is the result of the outrage and frustration engendered by prejudice and social injustice in a time when every 30 seconds a human life is lost to AIDS. Although I mourn the deaths of the thousands already lost to the epidemic, I will nevertheless go on to celebrate the love, friendship, and sex that happens between men as one of the most beautiful things in life. I will not allow myself to indulge in the views of pathetic moralists who claim the epidemic to be some kind of divine retribution as a result of queer promiscuity, which can only lead to a sorry state, but rather to celebrate and enjoy those moments with friends and lovers that makes life worth living.

In my work there is a search for a kind of redefinition and re-evaluation of my perception of matters such as life, death, sex, aging, the body and spirituality. I think that the aids epidemic is one of the main concerns for a need for a new way of thinking and living. Aids, then become, not the unfortunate and fatal disease that is threatening human existence, but part of our post-modern condition which requires a whole new mindset and the way we perceive time and relate to each other as human beings.

Johannesburg, September 1995