Placed, displaced, and replaced : an exploration into a hybrid South African identity

Abstract

This study explores my experiences as a displaced person through processes of immigration that contributed to my hybrid identity. I narrate my experiences as a white, South African, Afrikaans-speaking woman who was affected by my journey to Australia, from which I returned only a year later. This study presents personal experiences and narratives that are vested in a body of ceramic work as my area of practice, which are imaginative interpretations of these experiences. The theoretical text supports this body of practice by also referencing three artists, namely Leora Farber, David Hicks, and James Marshall, as artists who also concern themselves with notions of liminality and displacement. There are insecurities that I grapple with in this study, which are unfamiliarity, personal loss and separation, alienation, and uncertainty. I attempt to rationalise experiences within the liminal that sways and influences an identity, through a disruptive and traumatic space. Visually representing these experiences in my practice and theoretically exploring embodied experiences summarise this study on the construction of my fluid identity.