My work explores the role of the matriarch in personal memory and its influence on selfhood and gender dynamics. Through portraiture and archival imagery, I examine how the matriarch has been shaped, inherited, and reinterpreted across generations, and how it continues to inform selfhood and contemporary understandings of feminism.

I primarily work with oil paint on linen, using portraiture to reconstruct archival imagery, staged with myself or members of my family. Through reenactment, I explore the inheritance of selfhood across generations, using the body as both a personal and symbolic site of memory. The photographs are abstracted to create space for interpretation and relatability. Central to my practice is the gaze, which I either confront directly or deliberately subvert in order to question shifting ideas of womanhood, agency, and self representation often perpetuated in gender norms, language.

I am increasingly interested in how the matriarch has been historically expressed within the Southern African context, and how these representations continue to shape contemporary understandings of womanhood. Rather than approaching the work as a form of empowerment or resolution, I am drawn to an investigation that allows history, memory, and contradiction to coexist. The paintings are held as both questions and statements refusing fixed conclusions.