First seen at Nirox Sculpture Park, 2024, following Bailey's artist residency.
Subsequently exhibited in Ethereality (Everard Read, Cape Town, 2025).
Cities, Islands, Gardens comprises a series of imaginary worlds, each measuring 1.2 m × 50 cm × 50 cm. Fabricated from a welded grid of metallic planes and lines, and finished in chrome-toned powder coat, the works incorporate laser-cut drawings that refuse a single, flat perspective. Instead, they function as layered structures - architectures of depth - holding embedded text, symbols, and concealed details.
Across the series, Bailey returns to a consistent visual language: blades of grass, and silhouettes of South African flora drawn from her childhood farm outside Johannesburg. In Islands, fish forms appear alongside glyphs, broken syntax, and fragments of cut-away language, words removed until only debris remains, legible as a private code.
The works draw on literary and vernacular traces: an echo from Nabokov, “Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the sign”, sits alongside dislocated refrains and clipped pleas for escape: “here is the greener grass / no, here is the greener grass,” and “how silly and how sad…” Security cameras recur as silhouettes, as do otherworldly, cyber-signal forms and abstracted emblems. Aeroplanes repeat as cut-out icons, and a salvaged chord from an aeroplane engine is welded and powder-coated into the structure, part relic, part talisman.
Bailey’s nude selfie also reappears, linking the series to Crude Encryptions and extending its questions of visibility, privacy, and self as encoded material. Taken together, the language of Cities, Islands, Gardens points to a desire to be everywhere and nowhere at once - to exit the logic of the flat, mirrored cage, and to build a space that can hold contradiction, longing, and flight.
