Part of "Heritage Collection"
Acrylic on canvas
910mm x 610mm
This mixed-media painting incorporates pigment made from borrie, alongside charcoal, texture and fragmented text. Set within a flattened silhouette of Cape Town, the surface carries traces of counting, mapping, and erasure. The borrie pigment settles unevenly, staining the work rather than coating it, while repeated patterns and gestural marks reference inherited rhythms embedded in the city’s landscape and culture.
The use of borrie as paint is both material and linguistic. The word borrie, a Cape vernacular term derived through Dutch and Malay influence, carrying within it the layered histories of trade, migration and enslavement. Spices moved through Cape Town as commodities within global systems of exchange, while much of native human presence remained unrecorded. Over time, their names, uses, and meanings were transformed locally, becoming part of everyday life and cultural memory.
The surface acknowledges the vibrant Cape Coloured culture not as a fixed identity, but as something continually formed through blending, resilience, reinterpretation and discovery. What emerges is a work where colour, language, and mark-making hold inherited knowledge memory carried forward through use, rather than preserved through record.
"Yes, I used actual "borrie" the idea came about simply as I was decanting my spices and had too much leftover. Considering this spice is known to stain... my brain then goes hmmm I wonder what this would be like as paint?"
Sho, I've learnt so much about parts of history of my own heritage with this one. Many aspects of which I've tried to pay homage to with by embedding various imagery throughout the painting.
"!Hui !Gaeb" (pronounced kwee-gehb) is a Khoisan name associated with the Cape region; invoking indigenous presence before colonial naming. Directly related to "where the clouds gather" refers to the view of Table Mountain and its tablecloth of clouds.
The Liesbeek River became one of the earliest colonial boundaries; symbol of division and land control.
The term “Borrie” (Tumeric) is mainly used by Afrikaans-speaking communities in the Western Cape, especially within Kaaps and Cape Malay food culture.