Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Tide and Seed, a solo exhibition by Ravelle Pillay and her first with the gallery. Featuring a selection of new paintings, this exhibition expresses Pillay’s core thematic considerations and unpacks the historical context that informs her practice. 

As a descendant of labourers who were transported to the former British colony of Natal as part of a larger system of Indian indenture, Pillay’s work is closely informed by legacies of colonialism, and their reverberations in the present. Pillay uses painting and drawing as a material means through which to explore how colonial legacies have found form in personal and collective memory, the natural world, and in the idea of haunting.  

Pillay’s borrowed archive of her grandmother’s photo albums provides a foundation to the subject matter of her paintings and into understanding her family’s history within a larger narrative: the displacement of indentured migrants, the still-present spectres of Apartheid, and of place and belonging. As Pillay writes, “I started to think more about life-making inside of these systems, how lives were made ‘in spite of’ and ‘in defiance’.”