I knew they were leaving, i just didn't know it would be so sudden, 2014–15

From a younger Thuli, sometime around the end of 2014:

"There exists a bleak feeling now, in knowing that the wasps are gone.

I keep seeing wasps around, since I’ve left Michaelis. They are just starting out, assembling their paper homes from scratch. I feel like warning them that within the year, they’ll all be dead, and they won’t have changed the world.

I thought my wasps were special. I used to like the idea of surveying their ill-appreciated, hardworking lives from beginning to end. But now that the season’s come around again, I’m starting to recognise infinitely more seasonal realities around me that unfold cyclically, never resolve, and die.

My own blue nest is a version of the tiny world the wasps let me into. Their activity lured me into the small things, pulling me into details of daily activity and giving me a meditative starting point from which to could consider life's tendency toward repetition and recurrence. They arrived a couple of months into 2014, and I watched them closely nearly everyday. On the evening of the 16th of September, I stared up into their corner to look at the nest. It hung there, empty. As a passive observer, I was never once stung.

‘I knew they were leaving,...' is a study of the un-monumental, and a scrutinisation of the mundane actions and things from the everyday. It functions as a collection; a collision of objects that reflect my interest in the motions of daily living, my consciousness of time passing, and my fascination with structures involved in home-building and nest-making.

In dimly lit clusters and in blue corners, the remnants of processes lie still- dead- telling and retelling a number of tales of living, not one of which remains true beyond the moment of its conception."

xox