Days Gone By

I attended the Venice Biennale 2017 in Venice and naturally the works that are linked to my previous assignments interested me most because of my research and interests. Luboš Plný work stood out for me, his work was anatomy drawings and linked into my previous concept, Heart Matters. On return to South Africa I paged through my Biennale book and saw his 2017 work, where he placed his mother’s ashes in a petri dish and wrote every day she lived in numbers around the dish in a circular format. This made me think of my own experience of losing my father and it made me ask? How many days have gone by since his death?

I calculated, how many days he lived until I was born, how many days I lived with him and how many days have gone by since the day he passed. Thinking in days instead of years changed my view completely. Drawing a line with a piece of charcoal for every day he lived, became a meditative process for me. Making me relive the days in my mind, wondering what he was like as a child and how he would have been if he was still around. It became a memoir piece about his life.

Losing my father at a young age also left me with many questions, I then moved to investigative mark making and mapping trying to map out the memories I have on paper or showing my constant searching for information I don’t have.