The Field as Witness positions the sugarcane fields of KwaZulu-Natal as living archives – spaces of becoming, remembrance, and inheritance. These fields are more than landscapes; they bear silent witness to the labour, endurance, and unfulfilled promises of the men and women who worked them. Lives reduced to indenture numbers, ship lists, and fragmentary records left few traces in official archives. What was never photographed, named, or fully documented remains held in the land itself.

Moving through this terrain is the hare, a liminal figure existing between worlds and times. It carries the uncertainty of indenture: people suspended between homeland and plantation, belonging and displacement, memory and erasure.

My earliest encounters with history shape this work: the bedtime stories my dad told me as a child, describing places and lives I could not see, lives I had no physical reference for. The fields existed only in my imagination, formed through voice, feeling, and repetition. Later research into my own existence as a South African woman of Indian heritage uncovered ship lists, numbers and fragmented records of my ancestors’ lives. These discoveries revealed that history lives not only in formal archives but also in everyday acts, in memory, and in attentiveness. So visually, my work often evokes the style of children’s books. This aesthetic honours the fragility and intimacy of memory, transforming it into a visual language that bridges past and present.

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