Land, Belonging, Home Series 1 1998-99


The title of this series Land, Belonging, Home was adapted from Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses. In the opening pages there are only two survivors in a plane explosion transporting migrants from their homeland. The explosion presented simultaneously as reality and fantasy, as a metaphor for the violence of displacement and as the birth, or rebirth, of the characters into a new context. Rushdie writes (p4)-

Mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed off selves, severed mother- tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, Land, belonging, home.

This series is an internalization of those notions- distance, place, home- that I have identified where the meanings are blurred yet directly allude to a cultural specificity that references my ancestors experiences of displacement. I imagine my ancestor’s plight at leaving their home, being in a state of mid-air as their journey proceeds and finally arriving in a foreign land. I describe what I imagine they must have experienced by unveiling and veiling of images to create a sense of motion, a bringing alive and a finishing off all in one.

The work resolves into images having many layers where the order and sequence of its arrival cannot be disentangled. There is layering of meaning as well as materials. Faces of my family are the dominant images. They are figures in transit, reflecting the drama of the stranger cut off from their homelands of tradition and experiencing a constantly challenged identity in their new home Figures are anxious, alert, fragmented, monochromatic, symbols of uncertainty. Overlayed and intertwined with images that evokes life and energy.

Land, Belonging, Home is only part of their story. This transitory zone that I describe is, characteristic of the end of the 20th century, and has been referred to as an “in-between –space” by post-colonial theorist Homi Bhaha. “In the fin de siecle”, he contends, “we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.”
(The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge, 1994 P1)

The works are about the transformation of my experience of the world-not by imitation, but by simultaneous acceptance and rejection. I explore mixed media and collage as a medium to make connections between the intersections of their histories and memories.
Memory is represented by the spaces between the figures that are unstable, blurred and refer to what is remembered and forgotten, what is fact and fantasy.

The works combine photographic and computer technology, etchings, text, drawn and painted images to construct interplay between reproduced and imagined images.
Collage fragments are applied to the surface in order to explore further avenues for expressions of ambiguity.i.e. The ambiguity of the past and the present existing simultaneously. The surface of the work consists of layer upon layer of fragments of images, arranged and rearranged to make new relationships. The fragments are layered in a landscape format, the edges blur the boundaries of time, history, fantasy and narrative structure.

The elements that form the work are played off against each other creating ambivalence between structure and vitality, order and disorder, between a feeling of beginning and a sense of ending.