This image, called Holy Gang, combines an image of a church in my mother’s home town, Fateng-tse-Ntsho, in Free State province, South Africa, with self-portraits of me, multiplied to form a group of women. Although at first glance the women are moving towards the church, it is not the final destination.

Positioned higher, beyond the church, is what appears to be a rising sun. For me, the sun represents a place where I can meet and be with my ancestors beyond religious limitations, even though they were members of the church and I am not.

I was born in Soweto and moved to Johannesburg’s southern suburbs when I was seven. Throughout my early life, I moved between urban Johannesburg and Fateng-tse-Ntsho, where my mother and I returned each year to visit family or attend funerals. I grew up negotiating multiple ideas of “home” and “belonging” without feeling entirely rooted in any of them. This experience led me towards spirituality as a way of thinking about identity, belonging, and my relationship to a larger collective.

Whenever I visited my family in Fateng-tse-Ntsho, I would walk past the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk in Afrika, or the Dutch reformed church in Africa, that my great-grandmother and her daughters belonged to. It became part of my core visual memory from childhood, and it enters the work as a remembered image rather than as a religious symbol. Its significance lies in its familiarity, its connection to my childhood, and its relationship to the women in my lineage.

The image is part of the Spirit series of digital collages that I began working on in 2021. Through the series, I use self-portraiture and white cloth to embody my female ancestors. The white becomes a visual language of transcendence that allows me to access my forebears and be alongside them. Rather than separating those who belong to the church from those who do not, the white binds us together. I may not subscribe to their religion, but I can still encounter them through lineage, memory, spirituality and our literal DNA.

The title, Holy Gang, introduces another tension. “Gang” in this context suggests agency, solidarity, loyalty, movement and collective force, allowing me to think of the women of my lineage as more than their religious practices and beliefs. Holy Gang is ultimately an imagined meeting place for me and the women who came before me.

In this artwork, I do not “enter” the image to become part of the church; I enter to meet and journey with those women beyond the church, toward the sun. The church becomes the backdrop against which this encounter takes place, a structure that is part of our shared history but not the limit of our spiritual belonging.