It’s about sea urchins and polystyrene. And how they’re the same, but different. How everything is both trash and precious – that there’s no real difference between high and low. There’s beauty and ugliness in everything, and I (and this show) try to dance to both tunes.

It says everything about us.

I think things are not what they appear. I’m drawn to looking at what is underrepresented and misrepresented. In my carving a piece of wood to look like a plastic chair, I’m “totemifying” those original objects, and making myself and (hopefully) others aware of what lies beneath the surface.

Tough question. And my answer would probably change daily. Right now, though, Optimism, my collage-assemblage tapestry made with the Rorkes Drift ELC Art Centre. Why? Lindsey Raymond explains it very well: “Platter interrogates our culture further in Optimism, a hand-dyed wool tapestry woven by an arts and crafts centre in Kwa-Zulu Natal. Once started up by Swedish Missionaries, it is now run by a community of isiZulu women. The craft centre is based on contentious land, the site where the Battles of Rorke’s Drift and Isandlwana took place during the Anglo-Zulu War. The large-scale textile work is formed from individual tapestries, each sized to the format of a yoga mat, stitched together to create a counter-narrative pop-object using old looms and artisanal craft. The sayings and fonts, which make up these designs are informed by bumper stickers. Again, he mixes high and low culture, using ‘lowbrow’ African craft as a sartorial device to translate his naive style. The piece when considered within the context of power and privilege, interrogates capital, class, labour, and colonial exploitation”

Its an ongoing archaeological web dig that we’ve being working on together for over 5 years. It’s based on the early video game, Leisure Suit Larry – and is meant to be a place where one can find remnants of a playful, less homogenous internet. You should be able to have an “experience” and go done rabbit-holes and dead ends.

I’d say that I use objects and artworks to meditate on culture, and try to help me make sense of the world.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if I were a sea urchin?”

Before the pandemic I had been through a cancer relapse and then chemotherapy, so I’d already had a lot of time to ponder things. What I can say, is that the messages and work always changes and morphs, and different things are always amplified depending on the context.