When did you return to South Africa?

I came back in late ‘79. While I was away my parents had moved to Durban, and so I went there. And then in 1980 I got a job teaching fine art at Durban Tech. Now I had a salary and could have a little apartment which I made into a studio. The cake paintings came just like this [snapping her fingers]. At the time, some people said, Oh they're so sensual; it must be because she grew up in a bakery with lots of luscious cakes around. But there were also others who recognized in them a sensuality with criticality, something I had struggled to integrate in my English art school experience.

Feminism could sometimes be extremely cheerless.

You couldn't have anything that was too ambiguous, because it could be read as not having a position. In the cake paintings, all the stuff that had been in my head was coming together. This involved being as conscious of the symbolic freighting of oil paint as the opportunities it offered for experiment. Oil paint is traditionally associated with picturing flesh – especially female flesh – and beauty. In the cake paintings, this kind of picturing is undercut by the excessive amount of oil paint, and how it ‘acts’. As the paint dries, it forms a skin, but underneath it is still wet and changing through chemical processes. The skin, the surface, slowly shows signs of the changes going on below. As it loses its juices it wrinkles, cracks and flakes. The painting ages and decays, like a real body. Of course, I'd work on it when the paint was wet, sensuous matter. I would lay down large areas of paint with a palette knife, making a thick flat surface that I would then act on in different ways, often perforating the layer in stippling fashion with the tip of the palette knife or in circular motions with the back of the brush. The ambient light would pick up the perforations and so a pimply or lacy pattern was formed. I'd often mould the paint into very high relief, so high at times that the form would collapse.