THE REST IS MEMORY
Rest is Memory is a tribute to grief, to what was lost, to what refused to be forgotten, and to the impossible task of holding both at once. Drawing from my family archive and recent images, working across fabric wall hangings, silver gelatin prints, assemblage, and cotton rag prints, this body of work wove together family, history, displacement, and memory into something at once elegy and act of preservation. Born and raised in South Africa, shaped by rural spaces and Johannesburg, and by years working with communities where loss was not occasional but constant, that knowledge of grief ran through everything here.
I worked with thread and fabric to connect myself materially to those I had lost, the needle's sharpness a reminder of pain.... and yet stitching also mended. Criss-crossing between the United States and South Africa, I found myself unable to disentangle my personal story from history, or my sense of self from a primal attachment to the land in which I was born. These pieces did not try to resolve that entanglement, they sat within it, attending to the way our deepest losses become inseparable from the ground that made us.
