In these works, I have used old family photographs as a source of oral narratives with missing elements. The photographs were shown to me by a great aunt who carries a more comprehensive history of my mother’s family. Although my mother’s family mostly migrated to Namibia in the early 1900s, their history remains inextricably linked to South Africa. This is mostly due to how the Western and Northern Cape are connected with Southern Namibia through historical and current migrations.

Out of all the migration narratives, my grandfather’s migration to Namibia remains a mystery. The small details I know about him are that he was born in Oudtshoorn to parents who were undertakers. He worked in Namibia as a respected teacher and later as a school headmaster. As far as my grandfather’s ancestry is concerned, my mother's brother, who visited Oudtshoorn, tried to trace our lineage and learnt that my grandfather’s family was creolised through settler and enslaved histories. His legacy was, however, tainted with the vestiges of alcoholism, which sent his life into a spiral from which he never recovered.

To compensate for all the missing information about my grandfather and his histories in Oudsthoorn, I turned to the landscape and plants, indigenous and alien, to trace and imagine an embedded history. Through making the works with a technique called ecoprinting, the works try to allow the plants to reveal hidden plant histories that are tied to indigenous histories often denied in my ancestors’ stories.

The magic of the plants’ latent pigments and tannins are only revealed through a steaming process. Once the colours are revealed, they are further transformed by layering various printing techniques onto them. The etchings I have layered onto the ecoprints were made from salvaged silver-plated trays that speak to the ‘ordentilikheid’ encouraged in my mother’s family, where there was no place for ‘uncivilised’ and shameful behaviour. It is no wonder that my grandfather’s memory seems to be erased from our public narratives. I have, for this reason, only depicted the women, my grandmother, and her family in the etchings layered into the works.