A Series in Six Works
Underworld
Six paintings. Six stages of descent and becoming. Each work maps a territory most women know but few are given language for — the interior terrain where the old self dissolves and something more feral, more true, moves through.
There is a world that exists beneath the performed one. Beneath the accommodated life, the managed voice, the face shaped by expectation — there is a woman who has not forgotten what she is made of. These works do not romanticise the descent. They document it. The darkness here is not decoration; it is the condition in which the deepest knowing becomes possible.
The Series
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I / VI
The Call
She does not decide to go. The decision has already been made, deeper than thought, in the tissue that remembers what the civilised mind forgot. The great animal — all sinew and pattern, all ancient knowing — rises at her back, not as threat but as signal. Her body has always known this creature. It has only been waiting for the silence necessary to be heard. This is the moment before the crossing: the body oriented, the instinct awake, the self on the threshold of its own wilderness.
II / VI
The Stripping
Here she turns away from the world that named her. The compass crown — gold, orienting, definitive — marks the last directions the outer world will give. What is shed is not weakness but accumulated armour; the garments of compliance that kept her legible, that kept her safe, that kept her small. The figure is neither falling nor standing — she is held, mid-dissolution, by the pressure of her own becoming. Loss here is not failure. It is the necessary cost of going further in.
III / VI
The Deep
She has arrived at the floor of herself. Multi-armed, multiplied — the self in the underworld is not singular. She is the sum of every woman who has ever stopped performing and felt the current of her own strange life move through her. The creatures here are not threats; they are the wild intelligences that live in depth, that have always circled the core of her. Gold-flecked light falls from above but she does not rush toward it. She is learning what the deep has to teach before any ascent is possible.
IV / VI
The Heart Laid Open
The red heart burns at the centre. Not metaphor — fact. The underworld asks that the most defended thing be offered up to examination: the grief that was swallowed, the fury translated into competence, the love redirected into service. Flowers grow from her wounds and her crow perches unafraid at the crown of her darkness. Blue veins of cold truth run across the body. Red threads of heat run outward. She has not died here. She is being sorted — stripped to what cannot be taken, and discovering how much that is.
V / VI
The Migration
The moon is amber now — not cold and grey but warm, animal, close enough to steer by. She moves with the great bodies: the cetaceans who navigate by sound, by pressure, by a knowing that requires no map. The stitches at her crown are not wounds; they are seams — the places where old and new self have been held together long enough to merge. Gold filigree traces the edges of her movement. She is not searching. She is travelling toward what she already knows the precise location of.
VI / VI
The Return
She comes back doubled. The woman who descended and the woman who waited at the surface face each other across the axis of the bird — the creature that moves between worlds. The symmetry here is not harmony; it is tension held in balance. The wild-feathered self and the surface-dwelling self are not reconciled so much as acknowledged — both real, both necessary, both part of the same undivided woman. This is not an ending. It is the first moment of living as the whole of what she discovered she was.
Acquire a Work
Each work in the Underworld series is available in two forms — a limited edition archival print, and an exclusive artist's proof on gold metal. Both are produced with the same intention that drives the paintings themselves: nothing made carelessly, nothing made in excess.
Three works from the series are produced on gold metal with unique surface finishes — each one a singular object. These are not reproductions. They are material extensions of the work itself: the image held in metal, weighted, unrepeatable.
Underworld — Series of Six, 2024
Limited edition archival prints · ana kuni studio, cape town