Fault Lines

My artworks focus on South African ways of being, specifically within the post-apartheid South African context. Living in different parts of South Africa has shown me how our past still permeates our present. The roads we drive on today are the ones our grandparents travelled on, years ago. By capturing images and likenesses of contemporary society, one inevitably captures parts of the past. Therefore, my work aims to make these layers of history more visible that coalesce into the present and shape our behaviour. I aim to use the medium of printmaking to communicate these concepts. Drawing attention to traces from the past and how these inform our behaviours today. They structure as well as support our societies and communities. 

Printmaking depends on ideas of trace, layering and mark-making, making them suitable vessels for conveying these concepts. To me, mark-making plays the role of a record keeper; each mark in the print forever changes what the matrix can produce. This idea of record keeping can be seen in my work. They are bereft of people but are unmistakably lived in. Inhabiting space, as with mark-making, requires prioritizing what to preserve and what is left to decay. Preservation, neglect, and land have an especially complex relationship in South Africa. The Apartheid government’s deliberate neglect of the needs of Black South Africans left indelible marks on our everyday spaces. These marks are found next to those we carve every day. A clean steeple overlooks a dirty street; the laundry is drying, while your books collect dust. These marks come together into recognizable forms to be greater than their parts. In the same way, individual and societal histories come together in significant or banal forms. If you focus on individual marks or layers, you fail to see the merits of the whole. Accepting the present as it is, as the sum of histories, allows us to appreciate its quaint ugliness.