Johannesgift 2019-2020

This series of twenty works, entitled Johannesgift, came about after a recently retired land surveyor and resident of Darling gifted me a stack of orthophoto maps of the Swartland in 2019.

An orthophoto is an aerial photograph or satellite image that has been geometrically corrected to have a uniform scale and follow a specific map projection.

I was immediately drawn to these black-and-white aerial photographs with their superimposed grids and contour lines—they instantly recalled a similar aerial view of our family farm that hung in my childhood home. On that photograph, the farm boundaries were marked with red thread held in place by pins driven directly into the paper. This large image, with its delicate network of red string, captured my young imagination.

It hung in the family room where we children spent endless hours with our mother as she worked at her sewing machine.

On the farm, I preferred to experience the harsh, rugged open spaces of the Namibian landscape indirectly through that photograph, rather than being out in the elements with my father and his violent, unpredictable temper. In front of that aerial photograph, with its red thread, my father beat me so violently for rebelling against my mother that I lost control of my bladder on the patterned carpet. He warned that if I ever rose up again, he would kill me. It was an initiation. From that day on, I hid my feelings and opinions completely, becoming a loner who survived by pretending.

The gifted maps were transformed into a series of twenty works, all but one double-sided. To construct them, I combined the cartographic surfaces with drawings, machine-stitched red and white thread, and photographs. Many of the works engage directly with the official disclaimer printed at the bottom of the maps: “Whilst every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this map, users noting errors and omissions are requested to notify the Chief Directorate: Surveys and Mapping.”

The title Johannesgift is a fictitious name for an imagined farm—the terrain of my own story. It borrows from the South African tradition of naming farms after their original owners combined with gift (Dutch for "gift," but also "poison"), rendering the land simultaneously a blessing and a curse. This title connects directly to the Afrikaans plaasroman tradition, where the farm serves as both an explicit physical location and an emotional space.

Darling, 2026