Fern fiddleheads, 2026
Collage, trame verbale, oil paint
61 cm x 46 cm
Artist’s Statement
Fern Fiddlehead explores how the values and ideals of previous generations continue to shape our lives today. Fern fiddleheads, with their distinctive curled forms, recall the head of a violin—a component associated with balance and tuning—and become symbols of the ways people have sought to keep life “in tune” through established rules, rituals, and expectations.
Pages from Jess Davidtsz’s 1952 cookbook serve as Trame Verbale* for the background, connecting the work to a period when South African women were taught not only how to cook, but also how to organise and maintain the ideal household. The cookbook represents a framework of moral and social values that once provided guidance, stability, and order in everyday life.
This artwork asks whether the values that shaped previous generations is still relevant today, which of them continue to guide us, and whether we preserve them through choice or habit. Through memory, ritual, domestic symbolism, and botanical imagery, the viewer is invited to reflect on the origins of their own beliefs and consider how inherited values continue to influence the present, often in ways that go unnoticed.
* Trame Verbale, a technique developed by Badenhorst that layers transferred text in criss-crossed patterns to recreate enlarged photographic imagery. The result is a woven surface where words and images coexist, transforming language into texture and meaning.
