Sugar for the Pill
2023 - ongoing

Through photography, I create fictional scenes provoked by my memories. Using my relationships, and the relationships between my subjects as a source for study, I highlight the failure of memory to acknowledge the duality of pain and pleasure.

The preservation of memory is innate within the medium of photography. People take pictures in order to remember. Often what spurs the photographer to take the photo is a feeling of wanting to embalm the moment forever, this is why most personal photographs show only positive scenes, we don’t want to remember the shadows. The reality is that pain and pleasure coexist in duality, but this is not generally represented in the family photo album, nor on the Instagram feed. In my work, there is an awareness of pain, a quality of introspection. Love and loss are interlinked, pain and pleasure. Dualisms are what make life interesting.

This phenomenon, is present in my life as well as in my work. The nature of the work changes for me as time passes, dynamics of relationships that are documented change. Friends move on, break up. I can’t help but feel a different thing when looking at the work. I think that is the nature and inherent risk of studying your relationships. I try to create this sense of the contradictions and complexities of existence by inserting tension into my work. There are a number of dichotomies I present in conversation with each other; love and loss, nature and object, nostalgia and present-day technology, interior and exterior spaces, fiction and reality, intimacy and distance.

My photographs are an attempt for me to remember, but also an attempt to get back into my memories. I am no longer a teenager, but I feel like I am, or I wish to be, maybe. Memories are a lie, nostalgia is a trick. It wasn’t that good, it was plagued by newfound intense emotion I hadn’t weathered to yet. Or maybe it was? In high school, it is easy to have the new best night of your life, and I feel like it happened all the time. I had a very close-knit group of female friends. Every weekend we would buy bottom-of-the-barrel wine from the minimart on the corner and go down to the beach at night. Later one of us might be throwing up out of the back of a bakkie a drunk friend was driving. It seems insane now, but it was pure fun then. First love, listening to indie music and smoking cigarettes with the shower turned on. But also first heartbreak, coerced sexual encounters and expulsion. It was all very dramatic. We modelled our lives after adolescent films such as Palo Alto and, less aggressively, Kids. Reality mimicking fiction. I have been revealed to myself as trying to model my film-like photo scenes after my own adolescence, mimicking reality mimicking fiction. Wreckless abandonment, lack of embarrassment, maybe there is something great about your prefrontal cortex not being fully formed.

 Sugar for the Pill was exhibited during the cubicle series at Everard Read Cape Town in August 2024.

Catalog avaliable on request