INTERLACED

Interlaced moves the personal into the communal, weaving together what has been inherited, suppressed, and shared. African shweshwe and colonial English fabric sit alongside one another; a necklace of found shards of British crockery and military buttons from the Eastern Cape, the land of my colonial forebears, holds the tension between histories that do not easily reconcile. We are a collage of stories, a matrix of past, present and future, womb-like and interwoven. Once repressed trauma is brought into the open and shared, it becomes shot through with light, a kaleidoscope of shifting meanings. The photographic surfaces reflect this: images that dissolve and fragment, like a face seen in moving water. As each person inhabiting the dress voices their truth, something shimmers.... an ephemeral collision of you and I, then and now, a glimpse of something almost remembered.