A Fine Ballance really was a passion project and an absolute pleasure to run with my partner and concept artist Jon Wreal. After having spent lengthy seasons out in the desert together working for the central Crew DPW and on other Artworks we decided that we were going to make 2018 our year and boy did we!

The concept Jon came up with and we worked together tied together one of the Burns principles of decommodification and the economic and social plight of his mother country of Zimbabwe while also celebrating it and becoming a symbol of hope for the future of the county post-Mugabe. 

The Balancing rocks are a reoccurring natural formation found in various spots in Zimbabwe that was printed on many notes of the Zimbabwean currency and the fact that Zimbabwe used to be referred to as the breadbasket of Africa in more affluent became central to the sculpture we were to build. The decision was made that we would try and build some sort of a recreation of three precariously balancing boulders in a basket woven style. It was also essential that this be a sculpture that participants could interact with by entering and climbing up to each layer allowing people to have a space they could congregate, converse and connect in as well as providing platforms to view the rest of the site from.

In September with this in place, Jon and I started to work on making this a reality, no easy task especially with him living and working in Cape Town and me in London. pulling together designs, budgets, camp needs and of course the dream crew including teaming up to camp with Afrika Burn's first ever all-female crew, Skeleton Leaf, which was such a wonderful decision.

We were only finally together to get on properly with this when I came back to Cape Town at the beginning of March, we then had 5 weeks to prepare and implement our tiny budget built from a small art grant from Afrika Burn, fundraisers, crowdfunding and personal donations. We are very grateful and fortunate to have been received a huge amount of support from the wider community including the directors and Nathan Honey (No.1 Boss Man) as to how and where to secure free and or cheap wood, reliable consumables (Screwfix isn't a thing), assistance with transport for materials out to the desert, advise on how to set up our water filtration and waste system from Sas and generous loans of camp essentials such as our accommodation and kitchen stretch tents.

We constructed Fine Balance almost entirely from discarded or reclaimed wood with the only new Wood being the four central poles which we were lucky to have our friend Louw go out to chose and fell for us. The majority of the wood was sourced as off-cuts from a local sawmill a mixture of Blue Gum (hellishly hard) and Pine all irregular sizes with a maximum of three sides cut, old wine barrel sides as a generous donation from Luddite wines  that we used  to weave the middle rock, structural timber bought from a builders reclaim yard and off-cuts of Ply from the fabrication of Afrika Burn's new composting toilets, as well as assorted donations of unwanted timber from other artists and some hefty beams that used to support the old AB yard roof at Nansen Street.

Scrupulous planning of your logistics, materials, consumables, camp needs and feeds is particularly important when working on-site in the Tankwa being 120Km down a dirt road that infamously likes eating tyres before you even get to the next town and about 5 hours drive from Cape Town  forgetting or breaking something can be disastrous or set you back by days as you try and make a plan.

All of these preparations paid off when the first of our crew and our sisters from Skeleton Leaf moved out to set up camp and start building with two weeks to go before the festival started. As the build started and progressed with more and more of the crew dripping in over the 2 week period going from the initial 5 to the final dreamy dozen building up each floor with hardly a hitch. I realized that although the majority of the crew had little to no carpentry experience we worked well together and everyone was fully competent and with a little training and direction here and there we completed something we were all incredibly proud of. This was a true Afrika Burn project a collaboration of friends old and new coming together in harmony, gathering what we could, working together, teaching and supporting each other as we built a sculpture and space of reflection.

​