Madonna holding child
Acrylic, terracotta, shellac on canvas; 47’’ x 24” (119 x 61 cm); 2022
In my paintings, I seek to abstract the human form, with the images being derived from colonial archives. With abstracting these archived brown bodies, I recontextualise the white gaze towards its 'primitive' subjects.
In 'Madonna Holding Child', I reconcile the popular divinal European subject with the people of my homeland. The paint is painstakingly applied in ten or more layers and then going over with a chisel, I excavate into the painting, forming wounds on the body.
An experiment into the materialization of collective trauma, the grief of existence and death experienced through wounds of bygone violences on the body- as lived through ancestral genocides