SALT

A forensically mapped existential record of returning back home over and over, never feeling like you can ever truly return while also feeling like you can never truly leave without a piece of it embedded in you.

I grew up near a small town in the fruit farming district of South Africa, in a family that was and remains deeply rooted in their Christian faith. When I departed from that path as a teenager our familial relationships took a new turn as well. When I left home the month after I finished high school and moved to Johannesburg, an alluring big city four hours away, the physical distance between us offered for the first time the space to inhabit my world according to my own values and principles without the unbearably close reminder of how disappointing they were to the family.

At first I barely visited home, always finding the journey a terrifically difficult existential leap back into loving arms of my family, which at the same time was laden with the burden of our ideological differences. Over the years I gradually began to visit more frequently and found that whenever I spent time there I was obsessively photographing the details of my parents' home, my father's workshop and the lush surrounding land which I felt intimately connected to.

I have deep admiration for my parents who raised me to value a principled and kind-hearted life, I see them as honest salt of the earth people. This made my decision not to follow in their spiritual footsteps a painful choice to disappointment them. Through these photographs I searched forensically for evidence of these salt of the earth qualities that resonated in me, in objects and quiet moments, in the way the light fell nostalgically through old curtains I still know well, and in the mundane evidence of their daily habits and way of life which we shared so closely when I still lived at home.