I have taken some of my work to the Kizo Art Gallery so that I could support the Heritage Arts Festival. Kizo is a huge space in the Gateway shopping centre in Umhlanga that can take lots of work and display my big works easily.

The festival is unusual in that it has visual arts as the primary focus and I think it is just what Durban and us artists needed in the region. It kicked off with a Gala launch Party last night at the Kizo gallery, but it is much more than a one night event, with a number of exhibitions and events happening.

I am hoping that the Kizo festival will grow like the National Festival of the Arts did in Grahamstown. The Grahamstown festival grew from a local Shakespeare festival into an international event and I am hopeful that our Durban festival will follow the same way.

The latest work is ‘Phoenix Rising’. It is made from a piece of wild plum wood that I found at the Kei River mouth whilst on holiday in the Eastern Cape. The work is loosely based on a bird of paradise and I am most pleased with the firelike qualities it has.

My son, Jack, and 23 five year old classmates of the school’s Red Group provided a delightful array of little people, birds and Ladybirds with which to decorate the tree that I had made for the school fundraiser. I have called it ‘The Faraway Tree’. (Thanks to Enid Blyton for the title.) The tree looks like something from a Harry Potter film with its knotted, gnarled and dark features. The children have provided the bright, the light and joyous aspects in their glazed clay additions. They make a lovely contrast and it is a delightful object.

Thinking about it, there must have been some divine intervention as it was a pleasure to make and not the pain or the disaster I was expecting. Now that this little adventure is over I will have to go back to being grumpy Big Ears!