The Landscape Does Not Sit Willingly

The Landscape Does Not Sit Willingly is a visual interrogation of my hybrid cultural identity, which explores the connection between conventional family photography and concepts of belonging.

I am a child of tangled colonial histories, a fourth generation Zimbabwean of Indian origin on my father’s side, with Dutch and German ancestry via South Africa on my maternal side. As a citizen of Zimbabwe, I identify as African and by virtue of my marriage to an Australian, I am now an immigrant on the opposite side of the Indian Ocean looking back at one ‘home’ from the viewpoint of another.

This ongoing series, 'The Landscape Does Not Sit Willingly', evokes Tim Ingold’s anthropological concept of meshworks in which “every living being is a bundle of lines” that tangles with others[1]. The bold portraits incorporate elements of the natural environment, especially ‘native’ and ‘invasive’ species as a metaphor for belonging, layering archival images and African wax print embellishments, juxtaposing past and present, and creating something new from the entanglement.

The work plays with ambiguity, challenging at once the objective truth of photography and history and suggesting that as we search for a sense of belonging, hope can be found in the act of 'becoming'. Like the condition of hybridity itself, the series contains a selection of single images, diptychs, and embroidered images taken from documentary photographs of my family and homes in Zimbabwe and Australia.

The series title is from a Kei Miller poem, ‘What the Mapmaker Ought to Know’, 2015.

"On this island

Things fidget

Even history

The Landscape Does Not Sit

Willingly."

[1] Tim Ingold The Life of Lines (London and New York: Routledge, 2015)