The figure of the woman in the linocut triptych Theodorah I, II, III is conveyed through a minimum of mark-making. Her form borders on abstraction. She seems at once to be hovering in the empty picture plain, while simultaneously holding the weight of history in her prostrated body. She lies stretched out with her face on the ground in surrender or submission, reduced to a state of exhaustion.

At the same time, it is as if she is levitating – the recognisable, everyday figure of a working-class Black woman made strange, suspended in a space and time. Her body takes on different gestures and shapes in each plain of the triptych, as if she is caught in a state of fitful insomnia, tossing in the empty night with her troubles. The small white stiches in the woman’s dress are an intertextual reference to Marasela’s embodied connection to fabric as a medium and to embroidery as an artistic approach.

The figure of the woman in the linocut triptych Theodorah I, II, III is conveyed through a minimum of mark-making. Her form borders on abstraction. She seems at once to be hovering in the empty picture plain, while simultaneously holding the weight of history in her prostrated body. She lies stretched out with her face on the ground in surrender or submission, reduced to a state of exhaustion.

At the same time, it is as if she is levitating – the recognisable, everyday figure of a working-class Black woman made strange, suspended in a space and time. Her body takes on different gestures and shapes in each plain of the triptych, as if she is caught in a state of fitful insomnia, tossing in the empty night with her troubles. The small white stiches in the woman’s dress are an intertextual reference to Marasela’s embodied connection to fabric as a medium and to embroidery as an artistic approach.

The figure of the woman in the linocut triptych Theodorah I, II, III is conveyed through a minimum of mark-making. Her form borders on abstraction. She seems at once to be hovering in the empty picture plain, while simultaneously holding the weight of history in her prostrated body. She lies stretched out with her face on the ground in surrender or submission, reduced to a state of exhaustion.

At the same time, it is as if she is levitating – the recognisable, everyday figure of a working-class Black woman made strange, suspended in a space and time. Her body takes on different gestures and shapes in each plain of the triptych, as if she is caught in a state of fitful insomnia, tossing in the empty night with her troubles. The small white stiches in the woman’s dress are an intertextual reference to Marasela’s embodied connection to fabric as a medium and to embroidery as an artistic approach.

The comforter in conversation with Theodorah is representational in style, echoing the linocut lineage wrought by some of South Africa’s central figures in printmaking, who graduated from art centres like Rorke’s Drift in northern KwaZulu-Natal, Artist Proof Studio in Johannesburg and Dakawa and Egazini in the Eastern Cape.

In this poignant depiction of the generation gap and families wrought asunder by forced migration and the politics of domestic labour, the figure of a young woman embracing a child is set in dialogue with the figure of an older woman. But there is nothing but empty space between them; the older woman’s face is turned away from both the viewer and the younger woman. It is as if she is uncontactable – far away in a distant world of her own. Far from a fantasy, this work is a lived reality for many mothers and daughters in South Africa.