During the initial stages of The Visitor Centre, I developed ideas through multiple mediums as part of a relational research process. Some of these artworks were eventually incorporated into The Visitor Centre interventions, while other works signify particular points in the creative process that were later reworked, or that led me to consider different options.

 The Visitor Centre (2015) video was an important node in my creative process as it investigates notions of transience, flat ontologies and ongoing interactions exemplified through assemblage. Filmed at the burnt-out visitor centre at Tswaing Meteorite Crater reserve in Soshanguve, which acted as a temporary locus of this study and was where I held the first series of public events in June 2016. Although my presence as artist-observer is revealed in the sequence, the video focuses on a narrative of emerging nonhuman interactions.

 View The Visitor Centre (2015) video on YouTube.

Read Jenni Lauwrens’ (2018) article on the video: Trust Your Gut: Fleshing Out an Embodied Encounter with Nicola Grobler’s The Visitor Centre, Critical Arts, 32:2, 83-99.

 The large ink drawings Observations I and II form the basis of my discussion on care and empathy in observational drawing practices, while the sculptural work, Conversations (2015), developed from discussions with science educators, conservationists, citizen scientists, staff at Tswaing, a traditional healer and an animal geographer who relayed their accounts of cultural associations with reptiles such as typical skinks (genus Trachylepis). Impossible neighbours (2015), reflects on human-mosquito interactions in a series of postcards that depict subtle blood splatters on painted surfaces; these postcards were incorporated in The Visitor Centre I. Included in this body of work are the sculptural works Ambient I and II, and the photographs Hemidactylus mabouia: sever and yield.

Selected works were exhibited in Visual Encounters (2014) (catalogue), Rautenbach Hall, University of Pretoria; Staff exhibition (2015), Van Wouw house, Pretoria; Tempo (2016), the Van Tilburg Collection, University of Pretoria; at The Visitor Centre I intervention (2016), Tswaing Meteorite Crater Reserve, Soshanguve; and In the public domain (2018), Pretoria Art Museum. 

This work is based on research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF)’s Unique Grant 84414, and by the School of the Arts: Visual Arts, the Research Office at the University of Pretoria. Any opinion, finding and conclusion or recommendation expressed in this material is that of the author, and the NRF does not accept any liability in this regard.