In this presentation I trace the ghostly entanglements of a complex past through making. I use my jewellery praxis as a means to uncover the uncomfortable politics of belonging, place and displacement that haunt the South African landscape. I believe that landscapes are embedded in memory, and the South African landscape especially, is burdened with memories of a highly segregated past.
Through an enacted research process, that advocates for the bodily engagement with my physical environment I attempt to destabilize precepted boundaries. My research process involves the active production of new knowledge through doing. This process necessitates creating, researching, thinking and writing about jewellery through the entangled interaction between my own body, the landscape where I live, the materials that I shape, the texts that I read and the words that I write. These aspects continue to shape and inform one another. In this regard, I rely on a posthumanist perspective to destabilize the restrictions that strict dichotomies pose on my own perception of what it means to be human/artist/woman/white/researcher etc. Allowing me to perceive myself in relation to the materiality of my own body, my own subjectivity, the materials that I use and my environment in a non-hierarchical way.