Loos with views

Paul and I are generally early risers, but we were up super early this morning, bundled up in coats and boots, climbing up the dark and empty stairs of the lower cable station at Table Mountain at 6am. Why on earth? Well, we were taking a specially commissioned cablecar ride to the top of the mountain to see some work of mine that had been installed.

Before I show you pics of the work, here’s a photo chronicle of our early morning journey. It’s hard to describe how exciting it was to go up the mountain in a darkened cable car, with all the lights in the city still glowing, and then to walk around the deserted cable station, with no-one but white necked ravens, starlings and mongooses for company. I felt like the luckiest person in the city this morning.

The reason we were up there was to visit the newly renovated ablutions, where I’d been commissioned to design and execute a 7m long decorative wall panel. It is printed onto perspex and installed on a curving wall, and I can’t say how thrilled I am with the way it’s turned out:

The images on the are based on drawings I made of flowers and plants that grow on Table Mountain, which I turned into paper cutouts (see below), before supersizing them to be printed onto these large perspex panels.

The process of working on this project alongside Belinda Young of MLH Architects and the cableway team was fascinating, as it gave me an insight into the running of the Cableway. I realised that the cable station, although visible from all over the city, is essentially a little island, where everything it needs to function has to be shipped up and down by cable car.

I feel very, very privileged to have some of my work up at the top of Table Mountain, and am most grateful that I was approached to do the work. It is a beautiful place – one of the Seven Wonders of Nature, and a World Heritage Site too. Read more about it here.

Next time you’re in Cape Town, put Table Mountain at the top of your To Do list (with, of course, a little stop in at the loos).