Cover Girl
Silkscreen
2 Part: (2) 45 cm x 38,5 cm
Artist’s Statement
Cover Girl (2025) is a two-part series that is inspired by archival photographs of the women in my family. Through these images, I honour their presence, power, and silent, unspoken dreams. The photographs were taken during South Africa’s most oppressive era, a time when Black women stood at the very bottom of the social hierarchy. Their labour was exploited, their voices systematically silenced, and their aspirations often buried beneath the weight of survival. I come from a lineage of women once referred to as “kitchen girls”, a demeaning term that belied their dignity and dreams. With this work, I reimagine them not in the shadows of servitude, but as the radiant cover girls of DRUM magazine-iconic, glamorous, and unapologetically visible. DRUM once stood at the heart of Black urban culture in South Africa, capturing the spirit of rebellion, beauty, and transformation during the 1950s. It was a publication that not only chronicled the vibrancy of Black life under apartheid but also offered a platform for imagination and identity beyond oppression. This work is both a mourning and a celebration. It mourns the deferred dreams and lives constrained by a brutal system. Yet it also celebrates the richness of their existence, lives full of labour, love, softness, resistance, and survival. Through bold colour and layered textures, I reconstruct memory into monument, invisibility into visibility, and the domestic into the divine. In elevating their image, I do not just reclaim their narratives; I affirm that their legacy is not one of silence, but of strength.
Gallery
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