Ancestral Roots

Original charcoal drawing on paper in a round circle – tondo format within a square. Portrait of the profile – side view of a young woman in black and white. Monochromatic artwork – in black charcoal on white background.

An exciting event takes place in May 2023 at Cape Canaveral, USA with the launch of the NASA rocket to the moon.

An image of this original drawing has been selected by art curator Dr Samuel Peralta to travel in his personal payload on the Peregrine Mission. This forms part of the Lunar Codex archived on the Lunar Seal. The original remains on earth in my studio until it is sold. I am most grateful to Peralta for his generosity and kindness in including

For more information, see my blog on how this came about.

The young woman is in a serious reverie and in deep concentration. The reason she is this intense, is that she was standing on Robben Island, Cape Town, South Africa on the very soil that ex President Nelson Mandela lived and worked, incarcerated here as a political prisoner by the Apartheid Regime of the then political ruling party of South Africa. Here she is visiting Robben Island to learn about this horrific, emotional, and brutal part of this country’s history. Mandela opposed this Regime and was imprisoned for 27 years.

This young woman is American and was staying in our home whilst studying the groups of various societies and cultures of South Africa, and in this instance, the White Afrikaner society. This was a painful and poignant moment to experience. The emotions I experienced as yet another observer that day, were a highly emotionally-charged mingling of sheer disbelief, lack of trust in humanity, and of imagining the sickening atrocities and cruelty of the perpetrators. To me, this image encapsulates all of this torturous reality.