The large-scale floor installation Out of Africa (Under a full moon with signal fire and old smoke) (2014) takes as its structural blueprint the maps of early human migration routes out of Africa. At its centre sits the earlier sculpture Thoughts of a Dry Brain in a Dry Season (2011), which functions as both origin point and symbolic skull.

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This 2011 work consists of a damaged, burnt roof structure whose gutters feed directly into a symmetrical network of household plastic water pipes. The intricate, branching pattern of the pipes mirrors the network of blood vessels that nourish the human brain. The pipes themselves are scorched, cracked, and partially buried in dirt and dry grass, as though unearthed in an archaeological excavation. 

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The title is drawn from T.S. Eliot’s poem Gerontion (1920), whose closing lines speak of “Tenants of the house, / Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.” The empty pipes and parched roof together suggest a skull that once housed an entire lifetime of thought, now vacant, its tenant gone.

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From this central, excavated structure, elevated branching pathways extend outward across the floor. Two paths terminate abruptly — visual echoes of the “dead-ends” on migration maps where early human groups faced extinction through volcanic catastrophe, famine, or conflict. A third path leads to a circle of stones surrounding a signal fire; above it, loosely tangled strips of blackened wood hang suspended, representing drifting smoke. 

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The installation closes with a spherical white branch structure whose surface is painted in regular divisions and whose tips are stained blood red. The suspended fractal sphere suggests a full moon floating about the spherical surface of a round table-like pond beneath.

The entire arrangement subtly evokes a traditional Japanese moon-viewing platform, a place for quiet gathering beneath the full moon. Yet the work simultaneously traces the long ancestral journey: the slow, perilous movement of early humans “out of Africa under a full moon with signal fire and old smoke.”