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                                                                                                                                                  Installation comprising 3 components 

                                                                                                                                                  Exhibited on Transgressions and

                                                                                                                                                       Boundaries of the Page, Africana room,

                                                                                                                                                  JS Gericke Library, Stellenbosch (2009);

                                                                                                                                                  Gallery of the North-West University,

                                                                                                                                                  Potchefstroom (2009); and the FADA Staff   

                                                                                                                                                  Exhibition (2009), FADA Gallery, University of                                                                                                                                                                               Johannesburg (catalogue). 

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The first component of this installation comprises 13 prints that resemble pages of a Victorian woman's diary, mounted on linen and contained in a single frame. Each page contains narrativised extracts and direct quotes from Bertha Marks’s  - the British wife of the Jewish entrepreneur, Sammy Marks - original letters to her husband, sourced from the Samuel Marks Papers Archive, Kaplan Centre for Jewish Research, University of Cape Town. The texts provide insight into her homesickness for England and her sense of alienation and loneliness in southern Africa, both of which she attempts to overcome by recreating an English botanical and architectural environment on the Highveld. Like most British immigrant or settler women, Bertha Marks was reluctant to adapt her new surroundings. Rather, her identity was constructed around a constant striving to maintain Victorian attitudes, behaviours and values through assertion of Victorian codes of respectability, with their inherent assumption of white supremacy. 

 

The second component features a particularly poignant quote, printed in vinyl lettering mounted onto the wall.  In it, she expresses her feelings of hurt and frustration at her husband’s typically Victorian, paternalistic and chauvinistic response to the long letters she sends him. Her words convey a sense of pathos as she wonders if she should ‘only’ write ‘short’ letters to him in future. 

 

The futility of her investment of time and effort is shown in the third  component – a pile of crumpled, torn and discarded pages, upon each of which the same extracts and quotes are printed. The texts impart a gendered reading of the patriarchal ideologies underpinning Victorian gender relations and convey Bertha Marks’s sense of entrapment within the social constructs that dictated her day-to-day life as a wife and mother. However, while indicating her constrained position within a patriarchal social system, they also reveal how Bertha Marks, as an example of a colonial English woman, operated from within, and was complicit in maintaining, the exclusionary racial, social and cultural divides, prejudices and forms of subjugation that form the bedrock of colonial discourse. 

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