Willem van den Berg met een vrouw en een jongen bij een rivier in Makuleke, Zuid-Afrika 1968

This is a photograph from Makuleke, South Africa by Willem Jacob van den Berg. I'm looking at this image and thinking about the way that artists are always in conversation with each other. Like, van den Berg is out there in South Africa, snapping pictures of his family on holiday, and somehow, across time and space, that connects to my own work in the studio. How does this image relate to my own embodied expression? Well, like painting, photography is also a kind of looking. It’s about framing and composition, about capturing a moment in time and holding onto it. Van den Berg is composing his picture in this moment of pause, a group sat in chairs, the trees offering shade. He’s using the camera to make sense of the world around him, just like I use paint. And that, for me, is what art is all about - exploring, questioning, and trying to understand our place in the world.