Substance of Shadows
University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, Gauteng, South Africa
11 September – 2 October 2021

Inspired by the Human Shadow Etched in Stone at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Hiroshima, Japan, this solo exhibition tracks Emmanuel's continued personal fascination with the tenuous nature of memory. The only certainty is change. We try to hold onto memories in the hope of maintaining some coherence and continuity, but our memories are largely inventions and they too change over time. We commemorate our invented pasts in an attempt to fix them in the present. This exhibition is a collection of works scratched by hand into delicate carbon 'paper' or film. These carbon 'shadows' are all metaphors for carbon copies and products of one of life's greatest narratives – the carbon cycle. Carbon is an element in nature.