Opening from 14 May and running until 21 August 2025, ‘THEY CAME AND LEFT FOOTPRINTS’ is an exhibition featuring works by Lucas Sithole and Cyprian Shilakoe, from the Homestead and Bruce Campbell Smith Collections.
The title of the exhibition – ‘They came and left footprints’ – has been taken from a carved inscription on Shilakoe’s sculpture at the entrance to the exhibition. The words refer to his forebears who have passed into the ancestral realm, a reminder that those who were once present here left footprints long since erased, a poignant reminder of the transience of our lives, what we leave behind and how we are remembered.
The traces that Lucas Sithole and Cyprian Shilakoe left behind, deserve to be relooked at. The work of these two important South African artists of the 1960s and ’70s are stark reminders of the time and the context that both of them grew up and worked in. Their outputs speak of the harshness of experience ‘normalised’ under Apartheid and particularly, the effect on the fabric of families caused by the migratory labour system. Each artist in his own way reflects the fractured nature of their communities at that time, evoking the profound displacement, sadness and longing in lives strung out between their rural and urban environments; striving to make sense of oneself and one’s experiences.
Surrounded here by two bodies of work, brought significantly side by side, viewers have a rare opportunity to see a certain synergy in the remarkable records of their respective lives, skilled translations of their experience and insights into tangible form.
We encounter a world of loneliness and isolation in the tall, etiolated figures in both their works, sensing the social turmoil as we follow the underlying narratives in both men’s work.
Images and information courtesy of Norval Foundation
