The “Flying Foot” series of charcoal drawings emanated from a traumatic personal experience of going through a leg amputation in June 2020. My hospital stay felt like an invocation of a paradigm shift -Ba’zinzile- a grounding whose spiritual realm had come to mark a new epoch and transition. I imagined being admitted with two legs, coming out with only one leg as if the other leg had just flown off! Therein, came in my mind these series “Flying Foot” drawings as an enigmatic artistic expression. The debate that ensued between the surgeon and me, as a patient, as to where the amputation was surgically going to be done prompted the creation of this body of works. In everyday life, feet or a foot are parts of our bodies we less think about. Even when we plan to stand and walk, cross a road or travel to far off places, we normally don’t think about our reliance on feet as a dependable agency of that traverse. And yet, it is the feet that take us there, whose footprints we leave behind. It is feet that ground us. Wherever we go, it is our feet that are a mark of our histories.

It is feet that carry our lives and dreams.

Debating with the surgeon’s team and participating in the decision-making process of where my operation would be done were rehearsals for breathing which gave me strength. It was from these debates, though a patient myself, that I garnered a sense of belonging to their team as an imaginary surgical member that was going to operate on me. In reality, this experience was a rehearsal that preceded the actual act, a self-created transitory exploration of the next life.