https://ir.unisa.ac.za/handle/10500/28773 2026-10-03T11:21:04Z 2026-10-03T11:21:04Z Mosako, Daniel Rankadi https://ir.unisa.ac.za/handle/10500/33055 2026-09-18T05:31:26Z 2023-06-07T00:00:00Z

Swing Mosako, Daniel Rankadi Swings invites viewers into a profound exploration of the ever-changing terrain of human emotions. Executed in an abstract expressionist style, the artwork serves as a visual metaphor for the psychological oscillations that define our inner lives. Much like a swing moving rhythmically between opposing points, human emotions rarely remain fixed. We move continuously between hope and doubt, joy and sorrow, confidence and vulnerability. The artwork captures these subtle and dramatic shifts, revealing the fluid, often unpredictable nature of emotional experience. At first glance, the imagery may evoke memories of childhood, freedom, and playfulness. Many of us associate swings with moments of innocence and delight, suspended briefly between earth and sky. Yet beneath this familiar and nostalgic symbolism lies a deeper reflection on the emotional journey of adulthood. As we grow, our lives become marked by emotional transitions that are far more complex: moments of exhilaration can suddenly give way to uncertainty; feelings of belonging may coexist with loneliness; excitement may be tempered by fear. Swings transforms these internal contradictions into a dynamic visual language, encouraging viewers to recognise the emotional movements that accompany the human condition. Central to the work is the understanding that emotions are not isolated events but interconnected states that continually evolve. Human beings experience feelings as a spectrum rather than as fixed categories. One moment we feel energised and optimistic, the next reflective and withdrawn. These emotional fluctuations are represented through movement, colour, texture, and form, creating a visual environment that mirrors the constant reshaping of our psychological world. The conceptual foundation of Swings draws on contemporary theories of emotion, particularly Russell's Circumplex Model of Affect. This theory suggests that emotions exist along two intersecting dimensions: valence, which measures how pleasant or unpleasant an emotion feels, and arousal, which reflects the level of energy or activation associated with that feeling. Rather than viewing emotions as separate entities, the model portrays them as points within a continuous emotional space. Swings translates this concept into artistic expression, visualising the gentle and sometimes abrupt transitions that occur as individuals move through different emotional states. The artwork also engages with theories of embodied emotion, which recognise the close relationship between physical movement and emotional experience. According to movement theorists such as Rudolf Laban, the quality of our movements often reflects our feelings. Heavy movements may express emotional burden, while light and expansive gestures may convey joy, anticipation, or liberation. The swinging motion embedded within the artwork becomes a powerful metaphor for this relationship, transforming physical movement into a visible representation of internal emotional change. The development of Swings embraces exploration and interactivity as part of its creative process. Rather than presenting emotion as a static image, the work acknowledges that emotional states are continually influenced by personal experience, bodily sensation, and environmental interaction. Through responsive elements that may incorporate movement, participation, or sensory engagement, the artwork encourages viewers to become conscious of their own emotional rhythms. In doing so, the work shifts from being merely observed to being experienced. Colour plays a significant role in communicating emotional transitions. Vibrant reds and oranges may suggest intensity, passion, or emotional urgency, while cooler blues evoke introspection, melancholy, or calm contemplation. Greens may represent balance, healing, and renewal. As colours merge, dissolve, and re-emerge, they reflect the reality that emotions are rarely pure or singular. Human feelings often overlap, creating complex emotional states that resist simple definition. Experiencing Swings is therefore an invitation to engage with the cyclical nature of emotion itself. The repetitive back-and-forth movement embodies the psychological patterns through which individuals navigate life. Emotions rise and fall, return and recede, often in ways that feel both familiar and unexpected. The artwork reminds us that emotional fluctuation is not a sign of instability but an essential aspect of being human. What makes Swings particularly compelling is its ability to render invisible emotional processes visible. Rather than depicting a single emotional moment, it captures emotion as an ongoing journey, one characterised by movement, transformation, and continual negotiation between opposing states. In this sense, the work functions as a mirror, reflecting not merely feelings themselves but the complex ways in which individuals experience, manage, and embody them. Ultimately, Swings is a celebration of emotional complexity and resilience. It encourages viewers to embrace the inevitable shifts between certainty and uncertainty, pleasure and pain, calm and turbulence. Like a swing that gains momentum through movement, human growth often emerges through emotional change. By transforming inner emotional fluctuations into a tangible sensory experience, Swings offers both a poetic and deeply human meditation on what it means to feel, adapt, and exist within the ever-changing landscape of emotion. Swings is an abstract expressionist artwork that explores the shifting landscape of human emotions. Inspired by the rhythmic motion of a swing, the work reflects the constant movement between emotional highs and lows, joy and sadness, certainty and doubt. Through dynamic forms, movement, and colour, it visualises the fluid and unpredictable nature of our inner emotional world. Drawing on contemporary theories of emotion and embodied expression, Swings presents feelings as evolving experiences rather than fixed states. The artwork invites viewers to reflect on their own emotional journeys, reminding us that emotional fluctuation is a natural and essential part of being human. Ultimately, Swings celebrates the complexity, vulnerability, and resilience that emerge as we navigate life's continuous emotional transitions.

2023-06-07T00:00:00Z Mosako, Daniel Rankadi https://ir.unisa.ac.za/handle/10500/33054 2026-09-18T05:08:06Z 2023-06-07T00:00:00Z

Moods Mosako, Daniel Rankadi This body of work invites us into a rich exploration of human moods, approached through the unique lens of practice-led research. Rather than relying solely on traditional research methods such as surveys or interviews, this work foregrounds creative practice itself, whether through art-making, performance, or design, as a fundamental way of knowing. Here, creative activities are not merely outcomes of research but become central to the inquiry, generating insights that might otherwise remain inaccessible when studying something as subtle, complex, and deeply personal as mood. This investigation is particularly significant within the context of higher education in the post-COVID-19 era, where students have faced unprecedented disruptions to their academic, social, and personal lives. The aftermath of the pandemic has left many university students navigating fluctuating emotional landscapes characterised by anxiety, uncertainty, isolation, grief, social disconnection, academic pressure, and challenges related to identity and belonging. While institutions have largely returned to face-to-face teaching and learning, the affective consequences of the pandemic continue to shape students' experiences, behaviours, relationships, and wellbeing. As such, understanding mood has become increasingly important, not only as a psychological phenomenon but also as a social and embodied condition that influences learning, engagement, and everyday university life. At the heart of this inquiry is an understanding that moods are not simply mental states that can be described through language alone; they are deeply embodied experiences. They manifest through our physical presence, gestures, movements, and interactions with the environments and people around us. This perspective emerges from embodied cognition, the idea that thinking, feeling, and perceiving are inseparable from the body's sensations and actions. For university students emerging from periods of lockdown, social distancing, and digital learning, the body has become a critical site through which experiences of stress, resilience, loneliness, and reconnection are expressed and understood. Consequently, mood cannot be fully grasped through detached observation alone. To genuinely understand its nature, the researcher must engage with it bodily, creatively, and reflectively. Complementing this embodied approach is affect theory, which encourages us to move beyond viewing emotions as fixed, individual states. Affect is understood as fluid, relational, and dynamic, moving between people, objects, spaces, and social contexts. In post-pandemic university environments, moods circulate through lecture halls, residences, online spaces, and peer networks, creating collective atmospheres of uncertainty, hope, fatigue, or resilience. These affective currents influence how students experience learning, community, and personal growth. Rather than seeking fixed emotional categories, this work examines how moods emerge, circulate, and transform within these social and institutional contexts. Ethnomethodology further grounds this exploration by recognising that moods do not exist in isolation but are embedded within the routines and social norms of everyday life. Students continuously negotiate their moods through interactions with lecturers, peers, family members, and institutional systems. By paying close attention to how moods are enacted, interpreted, and managed within university communities, the researcher gains insight into the lived realities of students and the social processes through which moods acquire meaning. The practice-led methodology positions the researcher not only as an observer but also as an active participant and maker. Through creative practice, research moves beyond abstraction into the realm of lived and felt experience. This approach acknowledges that understanding often emerges through the very act of creating, whether through the stroke of a brush, a performative gesture, a digital artwork, or the construction of an object. Such creative processes become especially valuable when exploring post-COVID student experiences, where many emotions and moods remain difficult to articulate verbally. Through making, reflecting, and revisiting experience, new forms of knowledge emerge that illuminate the complexities of contemporary student life. The final research outcomes therefore encompass both the creative artefacts and the critical reflections that accompany them. Together, they provide a layered understanding of human mood that is at once intellectual, emotional, and visceral. Such an approach offers a meaningful way of examining how students negotiate the lingering psychological and social effects of the pandemic while adapting to new academic realities. What makes this work particularly compelling is its challenge to traditional models of emotional research. Conventional approaches often seek to categorise emotions through measurable indicators such as facial expressions, behavioural patterns, or physiological responses. Yet the moods experienced by students in the post-pandemic university environment resist such simplification. They are often ambiguous, shifting rapidly in response to changing social, academic, economic, and technological circumstances. By embracing practice-led research, this work acknowledges and honours that complexity, capturing the nuanced ways in which moods are lived, embodied, negotiated, and expressed. Ultimately, this body of work enriches our understanding of human moods by weaving together theory and practice, intellect and embodiment, individual experience and social context. It demonstrates that in order to understand mood authentically, particularly within the post-COVID university landscape, researchers must enter into the experience creatively and bodily, allowing the research process itself to become a form of knowing. In doing so, the work offers a powerful framework for understanding the dynamic affective realities of contemporary students and highlights the critical role of creative practice in making visible the emotional dimensions of human life that often remain unseen. This practice-led research explores human moods as embodied, relational, and socially situated experiences, with a particular focus on the realities faced by university students in the post-COVID-19 era. Acknowledging the lingering effects of isolation, uncertainty, anxiety, and the challenges of readjusting to campus life, the study uses creative practice as a method of inquiry to investigate how moods are experienced, expressed, and understood. Drawing on embodied cognition, affect theory, and ethnomethodology, the research examines how moods emerge through bodily experiences, social interactions, and everyday environments. Through creative processes such as art-making, performance, and reflective practice, the work offers new insights into the complex emotional landscapes of contemporary students, highlighting creative practice as a powerful means of understanding and communicating lived affective experiences.

2023-06-07T00:00:00Z Mosako, Daniel Rankadi Mosako, Daniel Rankadi https://ir.unisa.ac.za/handle/10500/33049 2026-09-14T08:46:12Z 2023-06-10T00:00:00Z

Mood-Swings Mosako, Daniel Rankadi; Mosako, Daniel Rankadi The green works artwork brings circular and linear forms into dialogue, creating a visual language of contrast and connection. The circular lines suggest movement, continuity, and cyclical time, while the linear marks introduce direction, structure, and progression. Positioned alongside one another, these forms generate a shifting balance between fluidity and order. The work invites viewers to consider how different paths, rhythms, and histories can coexist within a single visual field. Whereas the Blue with yellow edged artworks stages a visual dialogue between density and openness, presenting two contrasting but interconnected cores. The first form is compact and dense, suggesting accumulation, pressure, memory, and contained energy. Alongside it, the second work opens outward through gaps, lighter material presence, and permeable space, inviting movement and interpretation. Together, the works consider how inner experience can be both compressed and protected, while also remaining capable of expansion, exchange, and transformation. This is a Mix media art produced using builder’s oxide as a fundamental tool. This body of work is characterised by fluctuations of mood swings, that range from extreme highs (mania) to extreme lows. Keeping in mind that people have different personalities and mood swings. I identified these personalities and associated them with the functionality of the human brain. The brain is the primary organ that makes discretions on how to cope with stress, and recuperation mechanisms, that sometimes lead to physiological instabilities or inabilities. It is incredible to note how the state of personality disorder can be restored for positive outcome through psychological and psychiatric attention. Similar restorative energy can be referenced to human growth whereby human beings stand a chance to have their emotional moods transformed in a positive manner and surpass the mental state of dilution or odd lifestyle. The way the human brain responds to nervous system illnesses including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, stroke, and traumatic brain disorders is through a complex network of interlinked nerve tentacles. These clusters of disorders serve as a reminder of how crucial our biological foundations are to our behaviour. Surprisingly, the human brain deals with processes that have an impact on how humans think, feel, react, and behave. I portrayed these mental processes using multidirectional (lines) to formulate linear networks that emulate multifunctional and multi directional messages. Kietzmann et al. (2019) also relate the human brain to a complex network, which maps how the human brain works. Mix media on persplex using drip technique painting

2023-06-10T00:00:00Z Preller, Karin https://ir.unisa.ac.za/handle/10500/32992 2026-08-23T20:06:43Z 2025-05-23T00:00:00Z

Slightly out of focus Preller, Karin Slightly out of focus is a body of work that I exhibited at the 2025 RMB Latitudes Art Fair as an independent artist. The exhibition consisted of 11 new paintings in oil on canvas and one older work included because of its conceptual relevance. My focus was on still life, an enduring interest in my work. Most of the objects depicted are either my own or those displayed in a friend’s house, photographed and archived over many years. The paintings stand as evidence of objects acquired and treasured, moved and displayed over time, so that one recognises the same objects in different settings in different paintings. The objects are repositories of memory and obsession, testaments to the stories of their owner or those to whom they once belonged. While at first glance evocative of the cabinet curiosities phenomenon, the paintings invite reflection beyond their deceptive simplicity, to conversations about stories and histories emerging from the juxta-positioning of objects. In addition to the overt subject matter, the paintings make visible the central role that the camera’s mediation plays in my painting practice. The paintings are emphatically photographic: in the flattening of shadows and light; depth and shallowness of field; the blur effected by the camera; and the contrast between vibrant colour and monochromatic grey, the latter referencing my work based on old black and white photographs and film stills. Photography, then, is used as a means to set the subject matter at a double remove, adding to the haunting and melancholy stillness that underlie the apparent chaotic compositions. In a sense every still life is a memento mori – a reminder of the fragility and transience of existence and of the immutable and silent presence of objects, remote from that which falls outside their confined spaces. The staging of still life objects arguably implies a certain control over the world. I explore, through painting, to what extent my painting process and technique may shift the viewer’s encounter with these objects depicted in my paintings. In the way in which they are painted, the objects are there, 'present,' but disappearing in the blur of paint. I ask how still life can reorient the viewer’s attention and make visible the subtle, uncanny reciprocity of objects staring back at the viewer, signifying something unreachable and uncanny, which we cannot control. The question underpinning these works, and, to a large extent, a greater part of my research and art-making, is to what extent can the banal, everydayness, keep informing or shaping our views and approach to life and its challenges, with the possibilities for change, finding new avenues of seeing and responding to the world. The primary aim is to explore, in painting, what can be brought into focus through a seemingly random selection of objects in paint, especially considering the proliferation of still life paintings in an image-saturated world. The aim is to examine ways in which the uncanny phenomenon of objects looking back at us, decentering the individual, can be activated or set in motion in paint. The research methodology is practice-led in that the creative process both derives from and informs theoretical underpinnings pertaining to still life painting specifically, but also painting’s interaction with photography. The scholarly framework is not only the literature on still life itself – historical contexts, which change the meaning of any particular still life painting at any given time—but is also framed against discourses integral to both photography and painting and issues of representation and identity. The RMB Latitudes Art Fair provided a platform that reaches a wide audience, and the exhibition must, therefore, also be viewed in conversation with the other exhibitions. The works elicited comments not only on the objects depicted but also around the blur infused in the painting technique. In pursuing extensions to other ways of seeing, my work embraces the tradition of still life via working directly from photographs beyond observation. The infused blurriness illuminates and evokes notions of liminality and the transience of the real as it plays out in daily lives. Themes that underpin my work, and these works in particular, formed part of a lecture to Unisa students and staff at Unisa Art Gallery during June 2026.

2025-05-23T00:00:00Z