Dusty Storylines on Paper
Upon discovering a family archive of love letters shared with me by my mother from her boyfriend during the time he was serving in the South African Defense Force, 1979 -1980, I begun to question the ideologies attached to them. I found the duality of the expression of young love and the heightened political climate of apartheid a fascinating dichotomy which speaks to the culturally contemporary statement, “the personal is political”.
The master narrative attached to the love letters and the photographs kept alongside them, were an area of contest. Ideas of censorship – personally and politically – during apartheid – has had direct effects on how we understand whiteness in contemporary South Africa. Through the use of mark-making through drawing – a
medium, that I believe, holds potential for narrative reasoning – I attempt to deliberate these ideas of censorship, erasure and duality through the use of line, form and colour, into the contemporary.
