I'd like to end by asking you about your years at Wits University.

I came to Wits at the beginning of –84 to lecture painting and teach some art criticism. Art criticism wasn't a fully-fledged course at that time. Students went to exhibitions and wrote crits. Since I had an interest in feminism, and since I was the only woman on the staff, I ended up teaching feminist art theory. When Colin Richards arrived a year later, his task was to shape Art Criticism into a properly constituted course. Initially we double taught. The students were hungry for theory, because they recognized that art was becoming more discursive, but also because the political conflicts of the country begged for critical engagement: about the role of art and artists in the struggle, about art and society more generally. Colin covered the larger critical questions and introduced students to Marxist aesthetics. This was quite a challenge at the time, because much of the literature he prescribed was banned. Since I was also a painting lecturer and Colin also worked in printmaking, it was inevitable that the two domains – academic and creative practice – would converge.

In some respects Colin's critical abilities were honed through an engagement with the complexities of your work.

Yes, he said he was always sceptical about painting until he saw Melancholia, which became the focus of his first scholarly article. His writing on my work is extraordinary in so many ways. I think a lot of this had to do with him being an artist too. He understood the complexity of making. And he had a very, very beautiful way with words.

It's interesting that his work is so different to yours. In Colin's work there is the sense of endlessly meticulous and controlled labour. That control can transcend itself – but it's very far away from your thinking about the first form. The productive tension between two ways of working must have created lots of space for conversation between you.

It did. Actually, he had a few skirmishes with the first form, albeit by accident. Like when he had a spontaneous nosebleed while drawing and a drop of blood fell onto his meticulous work.