I really loved Boswell Wilkie Circus as a little boy. A stage. Lights. Spookasem. The velvet curtains opened, and the funny-sad clowns came running out. I wanted to work there. Instead, I built a paper model of a circus on the chest of drawers next to my bed. It was a flimsy imitation. And so I dreamt of elephants: flying ones like Dumbo in the movie. In my dreams, I rode on the elephant’s back. My circus life!

There is a Big Top hurly-burly to this piece. There’s the harlequin-clown. The rabbits (out of hats). Costume jewellery, netsuke masks and a pair of mermaids. And an elephant, of course – one that my teacher gave to me in Standard Two. (Dankie, Mejuffrou Botha.) Art is my performance. It can be tiring, but it’s something I have to do. Yes, it is about attention-seeking – but, for me, it is also life-saving.

Quan Yin – depicted in the two white figures at the top of the sculpture – has joined my circus. In Chinese mythology, she is a goddess of compassion: ‘the one who perceives the sounds of the world’. (A deafening roar surely? Or perhaps she hears it as a melody.) In tarot, the World represents completeness: the circus tent that contains us all – trapeze artists, ring masters, tethered beasts. Listen to the applause, Quan Yin.

The feathers are from Gustaf, the pet peacock that belonged to my friend Claudia. They remind me of Gustaf and Claudia, but also of Dumbo, who thought he needed to hold a feather in his trunk to fly. But you don’t really need a feather. You just need to believe you can do it. That’s what I did with The Circus. It was a flight of the imagination; a journey through dreams… around the world and back again.

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Photography: Russel Smith / Text: Jonathan Bain