I was raised with the same attitude as the Victorian upper classes – that stoic code of public conduct that taught women, and sometimes men, to move through the world a certain way. Suffer quietly. Ask for nothing. Show nothing. Keep going.
However, there is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from holding your face still. As Sigmund Freud theorised about repression: “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come out later in uglier ways.”
This body of work was born from a question I could not stop asking: what lives in the space between how we feel and how we are expected to appear? In a world that rewards composure – that mistakes politeness for peace and a smile for wholeness – so many South Africans have become fluent in a language of suppression: swallowing grief so as not to inconvenience others, packaging anger into a box in the solar plexus and wearing our disappointment as if it is a light coat.
Each painting in this series depicts a face in a state of performed calm. But the shadow tells a different story: It is where the anger lives, the grief wells, the accumulated weight of a thousand small disappointments explodes. The shadow is not darkness as absence, but as presence, as truth, as everything the face has been trained not to say.
Though I start with a thin layer of acrylic, the painting is predominantly in oil. I built up the surfaces layer upon layer, the way emotions accumulate – the texture of the paint echoing the texture of a life lived inward.
These paintings are not a call to unravel in public. They are something quieter and more urgent than that. They are witnesses. A record that says: the feeling was real, it was here, it mattered – even if no one in the room was ever allowed to know.
