Janet Ranson's 'singing heart'!

Janet Ranson is a Cape Town-based visual artist who has held solo shows, and participated in numerous group exhibitions and artists’ workshops in Cape Town and the UK. Her environmental art projects include co-founding Western Cape Land Art with Janet Botes, large-scale installations in Taiwan, projects at AfrikaBurn, a life-size grass elephant in the Ngong Forest, Kenya and temporary public works in Cape Town. These experiences inform her studio work, which contrasts the abundance of nature with questionable icons of popular culture. Janet loved being part of the Snake Eagle project.

Yes, Janet is behind there - we recognise that smile! Photo Credit: Jessie Doucha.

“Everything about the Snake Eagle Thinking Path makes my heart sing – the sheer scale and dramatic vision of it, the teamwork in building it, the incomparable site, the history and natural history, the sweaty work in the broiling sun in the company of fellow artists, the opportunity to observe different approaches to work and to discuss critical issues relating to land and nature art… everything!

“When I previously heard Wongil Jeon of the Yatoo Nature Art movement talk about the ‘open heart, empty hands’ philosophy it immediately resonated with me. I like spending enough time in a place to ask it what I could possibly create there. I used the rusted cans and pieces of glass bottles left by British soldiers during the Anglo-Boer War made wonderful ‘surveillance cameras’!”