I was a part of the Nando’s Creative Exchange in 2020, a project which pairs emerging artists with an established artist to develop a group show: which was showcased at the 2020 Basha Uhuru Festival in Johannesburg and at AVA Gallery in Cape Town.

My works for this show considered the symbolic value of royal memorabilia in South Africa as a proxy for a sense of half-dilapidated half-cherished familial relationships. The royal family in itself is a strange and dysfunctional institution, and when one looks at it through the veneer of how it represents itself its discontents become apparent in a nauseatingly saccharine way.

These works dwell on the visual queues of those mechanisms: dusty china figurines, almanacks in charity shops, and tomb-like display cabinets full of souvenirs from weddings watched on television. Sunbleached and peeling, sitting in a country which stopped being a part of Great Britain half a century ago: lonely, beautiful, and in denial.