Kerry-Lee Brinkworth- BA (Hons) Fine Art
Who are you when you are neither one or the other. When you exist between two cultures and don’t feel solidly in one or the other. As a person with mixed South African and English heritage, my work aims to discover this cross section of my identity. The feeling of being the most English around my family whilst also being the only South African of all my friends is a feeling many in the diaspora can relate too. By using family archive photos, I thread my own personal history’s, heritage, and memory through my work and explore ephemeral themes of longing, belonging, and nostalgia. The small glass beads I use link to a traditional beadwork technique from South Africa that has been reworked and applied to familiar tablous of immigrant domestic life and abstract them to a degree that leaves them more like a memory of the image or construction of the image entirely. The beads themselves shine beautifully in the light in often a full spectrum of colours, and their small nature gives them a delicate and magical feeling that captivates the viewer. I would also hope that domestic citizens would also look at my work and see similarities in their childhoods and realise the similarities in cultures despite where is it we come from.
