Sugar for the Pill
2023 - 2024

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.

Catalogue available on request