Man Overboard (2021) 

is a mixed-media exhibition consisting of video, sculpture and drawing that investigates nautical navigational signals as metaphors for communication, survival and orientation within post-apartheid South Africa. Growing up as a black–white woman, I have continually had to navigate social and historical obstacles, often relying on visual signals to guide me through an uncharted environment. The exhibition became a way of communicating with my father, bridging my English heritage and African identity through a shared visual language. Drawing on nautical navigational signals which is rooted in systems of colour, geometry, number and light designed to bridge linguistic barriers at sea. I appropriate their codes of distress and coordination to explore themes of visibility, miscommunication and urgency. By spray-painting these signals onto plastic drapery and sewing them together into an abstracted tapestry, their original meanings are rendered obsolete; yet their heightened colours and forms continue to signal emergency without resolution. Through this abstracted tapestry, the work reflects on lineage, patriarchy, colonial legacies, and the histories of bodies moving across water that have shaped the Cape.