Arts Thread

I am interested in the withholding of and telling of stories. My practice has led me to question the fragmentary nature of storytelling and storykeeping. Through the distortion of my familial photographic archive, I comment on and critique absent, forgotten and incomplete stories within my family, my immediate community and within a broader post-apartheid South African society. My practice is interested in the correlation/relationship between archives, memory, belonging and identity. It investigates the dynamic and nuanced relationship between these concepts. Archives dictate what is worth preserving and what and who is worth remembering. Through my practice, I intend to evade the erasure of individual, familial, and community stories as they occur in reductive colonial and narrowly individualistic representations of cultural identities. I am both an observer and a participant in the moments of stories I portray. Using drawing and sculpture, I create stylised black uncanny creatures I call little hauntings. These little hauntings act as symbols of loss by being fragmentary exaggerations of absent and incomplete stories.