erase it or avoid it. The last would have been simpler and easier, but not viable for me. AC: The issue of subjectivity and power relations particularly between the white child and the black nanny in South Africa is especially complex. PC: Yes, and that’s why it’s interesting to deal with. In some ways the black nanny may seem to have the power if you like, when she’s bringing up the small white child. But she’s always disadvantaged, even when she has that little baby, who she loves like her own child and who loves her, in a sense, like a mother. Then that relationship changes as the boy becomes an adolescent and older. What interests me is what happens in that experience. My interest here was probably stimulated, provoked or sharpened by the birth of my own child. AC: So one of the aims of your work is to signal the difficult ambiguities of that relationship—the loss in a sense, on both sides as well as the complex power relationship. In other words you want to make explicit that forbidden longing which is later denied in adulthood, by the white male child? PS: Yes, amongst other things. There’s trauma involved like the trauma involved when a child loses his mother. There’s trauma for the mother, and if one tries to read this psychoanalytically, the child has to have trauma to have a voice. The mother in effect loses her voice. In South Africa for white women this is not necessarily the case, but for black women that actually is the case in reality, so what I tried to do in Tula-Tula (Figure 1) is make a physical and material representation of the loss of that voice which actually doesn’t happen to white women. This is a ‘difference’ of the kind you mentioned earlier. White women actually have power. I wouldn’t say they have power in quite the same way as white men. They don’t. But they have or have had, for instance, more power than black men. AC: And that power actually relies on a relationship with black women based on their subjection. So it’s a relationship of both dependence and subjection. PS: Yes, and what I’m trying to do is draw attention to the fact that there are some similarities possible through gender emanating from patriarchal oppression and there are some connections that can be made across class and race. But there are, of course, differences too, perhaps absolute, that remain separated no matter what you think. AC: One of the series which plays on that ambivalent relationship of dependence, subjection and shared identifications is Royal Vermont: Hand Painted (Zulu Maiden) and Royal Vermont: Hand painted (Ndebele Girl). The piece consists of two plates, one with an adolescent Zulu girl and the other

DOI link for erase it or avoid it. The last would have been simpler and easier, but not viable for me. AC: The issue of subjectivity and power relations particularly between the white child and the black nanny in South Africa is especially complex. PC: Yes, and that’s why it’s interesting to deal with. In some ways the black nanny may seem to have the power if you like, when she’s bringing up the small white child. But she’s always disadvantaged, even when she has that little baby, who she loves like her own child and who loves her, in a sense, like a mother. Then that relationship changes as the boy becomes an adolescent and older. What interests me is what happens in that experience. My interest here was probably stimulated, provoked or sharpened by the birth of my own child. AC: So one of the aims of your work is to signal the difficult ambiguities of that relationship—the loss in a sense, on both sides as well as the complex power relationship. In other words you want to make explicit that forbidden longing which is later denied in adulthood, by the white male child? PS: Yes, amongst other things. There’s trauma involved like the trauma involved when a child loses his mother. There’s trauma for the mother, and if one tries to read this psychoanalytically, the child has to have trauma to have a voice. The mother in effect loses her voice. In South Africa for white women this is not necessarily the case, but for black women that actually is the case in reality, so what I tried to do in Tula-Tula (Figure 1) is make a physical and material representation of the loss of that voice which actually doesn’t happen to white women. This is a ‘difference’ of the kind you mentioned earlier. White women actually have power. I wouldn’t say they have power in quite the same way as white men. They don’t. But they have or have had, for instance, more power than black men. AC: And that power actually relies on a relationship with black women based on their subjection. So it’s a relationship of both dependence and subjection. PS: Yes, and what I’m trying to do is draw attention to the fact that there are some similarities possible through gender emanating from patriarchal oppression and there are some connections that can be made across class and race. But there are, of course, differences too, perhaps absolute, that remain separated no matter what you think. AC: One of the series which plays on that ambivalent relationship of dependence, subjection and shared identifications is Royal Vermont: Hand Painted (Zulu Maiden) and Royal Vermont: Hand painted (Ndebele Girl). The piece consists of two plates, one with an adolescent Zulu girl and the other

erase it or avoid it. The last would have been simpler and easier, but not viable for me. AC: The issue of subjectivity and power relations particularly between the white child and the black nanny in South Africa is especially complex. PC: Yes, and that’s why it’s interesting to deal with. In some ways the black nanny may seem to have the power if you like, when she’s bringing up the small white child. But she’s always disadvantaged, even when she has that little baby, who she loves like her own child and who loves her, in a sense, like a mother. Then that relationship changes as the boy becomes an adolescent and older. What interests me is what happens in that experience. My interest here was probably stimulated, provoked or sharpened by the birth of my own child. AC: So one of the aims of your work is to signal the difficult ambiguities of that relationship—the loss in a sense, on both sides as well as the complex power relationship. In other words you want to make explicit that forbidden longing which is later denied in adulthood, by the white male child? PS: Yes, amongst other things. There’s trauma involved like the trauma involved when a child loses his mother. There’s trauma for the mother, and if one tries to read this psychoanalytically, the child has to have trauma to have a voice. The mother in effect loses her voice. In South Africa for white women this is not necessarily the case, but for black women that actually is the case in reality, so what I tried to do in Tula-Tula (Figure 1) is make a physical and material representation of the loss of that voice which actually doesn’t happen to white women. This is a ‘difference’ of the kind you mentioned earlier. White women actually have power. I wouldn’t say they have power in quite the same way as white men. They don’t. But they have or have had, for instance, more power than black men. AC: And that power actually relies on a relationship with black women based on their subjection. So it’s a relationship of both dependence and subjection. PS: Yes, and what I’m trying to do is draw attention to the fact that there are some similarities possible through gender emanating from patriarchal oppression and there are some connections that can be made across class and race. But there are, of course, differences too, perhaps absolute, that remain separated no matter what you think. AC: One of the series which plays on that ambivalent relationship of dependence, subjection and shared identifications is Royal Vermont: Hand Painted (Zulu Maiden) and Royal Vermont: Hand painted (Ndebele Girl). The piece consists of two plates, one with an adolescent Zulu girl and the other