NAM NDIKHONA
2011
Jessa Mockridge
MDF and paint
Nam Ndikhona roughly translates from Xhosa to English as "I am here also". Mockridge made this ghost version of an original artwork by Chad Rossouw, inscribed and titled I am here also, both made for and in response to the Pathology Learning Centre. His initial starting point was the image of the grave in Poussin's Et in Arcadia ego, Rossouw writes:
"The cryptic sentence with its slightly off grammar, will hopefully work as an incantation, something to stick in the head. The sentence works as a token of empathy, the "I" could be a person claiming to be a subject amongst all these human objects, but also recognising the relationship to between them. The grave-stoney aesthetic though, could also make the "I" into a personification of Death, which is the obvious reminder..."
