Driftwork, curated by Essence Harden, begins with the notion of remnants: fragments that persist after departure, traces that endure past erasure, impressions that hover in the space between consciousness and reverie.

Driftwork features painting, photography, sculpture, installation and mixed-media work by 11 African and diasporic artists, including Zalika Azim, Sandra Brewster, Sydney Cain, Janiva Ellis, Shaniqwa Jarvis, Anique Jordan, Lebohang Kganye, Nandipha Mntambo, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Sidony O'Neal and Jasmine Thomas-Girvan.

Across diverse artistic practices, remains and trace emerge as frameworks for investigating - on material, theoretical and psychic levels - the condition of lasting-ness as a generative threshold. These remnants – archival traces, chemical imprints, ghostly echoes and ritual gestures – find form in the artists’ hands. They are scraped into canvases, stitched into fragile paper, blurred in image, conjured in shadow and silhouette, and mapped across analogue, digital and sonic registers. In these guises, they operate as active sites where fragments register and unsettle the intersections of social history, institutional structure, diasporic pull and erosive presences.

These constellations of thought create an atmosphere that returns us to the scar, the grain, the singular trace – as Toni Morrison reminded us in her 1975 lecture at Portland State University: to make fragments yield the life they contain. This exhibition enacts the fragment as resonance – an active remainder that insists, unsettles and yields new forms of thought and creation.

The artists here take up remnants as both material and method. Anique Jordan reanimates erased histories through “impossible images,” where archives, absence and inheritance materialize as portals. Wura-Natasha Ogunji cuts, stitches and traces fragile surfaces, composing choreographies where longing and apparition shape rituals of becoming. Janiva Ellis scrapes and erodes her canvases, fractured surfaces holding tension between ruin, abundance and uneasy illumination. Sydney Cain conjures spectral worlds in graphite and soot, drawings that flicker like apparitions, dissolving as they take form.

Shaniqwa Jarvis reconfigures photographs into fragments and collages, suturing memory while acknowledging its rupture. Sidony O’Neal builds provisional structures from fragments and systems, staging recursive spaces where rigour and indeterminacy collide. Nandipha Mntambo transforms abstract surfaces with gold leaf and shadow, exploring hybridity, rupture and the shape-shifting nature of myth. Lebohang Kganye transforms family archives into theatrical tableaux, exposing history and memory as ongoing acts of construction.

Jasmine Thomas-Girvan transforms salvaged and ornamental matter into cosmological instruments, attuned to ancestral presence and spiritual resonance. Sandra Brewster transfers images into creased, ruptured surfaces, where motion and memory trace diasporic presence. Zalika Azim creates ritual devices and kinetic compositions, where everyday gesture channels ancestral memory and spiritual ascent.

Driftwork is permeated by a sense of reverie, where remains drift between material, psychic and social registers. These works are impressions, unsettled presences that invite audiences to move slowly, to sense what lingers at the edge of perception.

Text: Essence Harden