Description
Strata memoriae maps out a fractured geography by means abrasions, scratches, ruptures and layered pigment—the subject’s presence is neither erased nor untouched. The palette—deep greens, earthen reds, oxidised oranges and scorched umbers—evokes land, blood, minerals and conflict. These colours are not decorative; they are historical. They carry the sediment of colonisation, ethnographic display, silencing, resistance and self-fashioning that have shaped the representation of women on the African continent.
The cracked textures across the skin echo the contested histories within African portraiture—where women have been alternately romanticised, objectified, anonymised or politicised. Scratches cut across the surface like archival scars, suggesting images handled, traded and rewritten. Paint drips descend like rainfall, destabilising the fixed authority of the portrait and allowing it to dissolve and reform. The abrasions reveal substrata, implying that identity is never singular but built through layers of memory, rupture and survival.The subject’s gaze remains steady within a textural landscape that does not diminish her presence—it intensifies it. Through these distressed surfaces, the work reclaims the notion of what a portrait is—a site of agency, where the subject is not merely an object of history but also its author, bearing both the fractures and the force of continuity from the past into the present.
