Cathy Layzell

Over more than twenty-five years of practice across South Africa, the UK, and France, Cathy Layzell is a painter whose work explores colour, perception, and embodied experience through gestural abstraction. Working primarily in oil, she builds layered, luminous surfaces, allowing forms to emerge and dissolve in states of flux. Focusing on shifting wilderness environments, her work balances concealment and revelation, perception and illusion, darkness and light. 

Her practice investigates transformation, thresholds, and the unseen rhythms of life, translating the textures, light, and energy of plants, water, rocks, and atmospheric phenomena into immersive perceptual spaces.

For Site Specific, Layzell presents works from her Dark Forest (Nature’s Valley)series, developed in response to the dense coastal forests of the Garden Route. The “inversion of reflection” is a central device: 

The forest becomes a microcosm of ecological processes; detritus, leaf litter, and undergrowth hint at unseen cycles of life, decay, and renewal. Shadows, reflective surfaces, and layered colour become portals, inviting the viewer to experience not just what is seen, but what is sensed.