Marigold-swing I

Shamil Balram’s Marigold-swing I (2019) explores the relationship between ancestral knowledge and land. Balram spent much of his childhood on his grandparents’ farm in KwaZulu-Natal. He recounts how they would plant marigolds in between their crops to act as a natural pest deterrent. He grew these plants pictured from seed, nurturing life and honouring his personal genealogy. The box in which the orange buds blossom is a wooden crate that was formerly used for coal mining samples. Both soil and coal share a kind of kinship in being excavated from the earth. The re-appropriation of the crate as a swing in this piece makes reference to the swings often seen hanging from the bow of a tree on plantations in the Southern States of America. Balram elaborates, “I wanted to bring in this element of relaxing, but while thinking or remembering enduring pain and suffering”.