Adelle van Zyl

Collective Childhood is a series of small paintings featuring yellow toys - some newly acquired, others treasured from my own childhood in the 1980s and 1990s. This body of work echoes themes from my MVA installation The Pockets of My Jeans (2017). Below is a short excerpt from the catalogue:

By placing all these items together to form a type of self-portrait, I am reflecting on myself as the sum of all my influences. This collection of items forms a tableau that reveals a cross-section of my past, and I am searching for a meaningful pattern to arise from the details. The gathering of personally significant items might be a way of asking universal questions like “Who am I?”, and “Where do I belong?”, and a way of searching for evidence of meaning in my life.