Lemkus Gallery presents Delightful Inheritance, a solo exhibition by Brook-Lynn Norkie following her time in residence. Norkie is an upcoming artist working in photography and video, who recently graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Brook-Lynn’s work towards this exhibition is a continuation of her graduate project, El Draque and the Drake’s of the Eastern Cape (2023), which was grounded in an exploration of family heritage; the myth of ancestral knowledge and its bearing on stories about the self.
With the current residency project, Brook-Lynn has been interested in extending her graduate work in the form of a full-scale gallery presentation. An important feature of that work that she wished to develop further was the notion of inheritance, a reference to the supposed sum of funds owed to her family via the estate of their supposed ancestor Sir Francis Drake— a prominent English explorer, privateer, and slaver. This is of course a contentious relation to explore, in the sense that race and cultural heritage are further obfuscated in the process of reconciling family lineage.
In response to the fraughtness of historical memory that creates Drake as a recurring character in the family’s oral tradition, Norkie’s work revisits the past through its lingering manifestations: monuments, photographic archives, paintings, ancestral records. Following research, she utilises various methods (cosplay, artificial intelligence) to assume the position of Drake. This gesture serves as a way of parodying colonial thought, its absurdities and contradictions, by engaging in a kind of myth-making that willfully disrupts the past. Through these interventions, Norkie broadens the conceptual scope of inheritance, not only as the bestowal of funds, commodifiable objects, and birthrights, but as a set of doubts and anxieties passed down through generations.
An artistic and curatorial proposition that grounds Delightful Inheritance is the use of found resources. Photographs, documents, frames, and various props (flags, toy swords) are positioned alongside personally fabricated and AI generated material (maps, sculptures, paintings) and become threaded together in the myth-making process— forcing the viewer to question which elements are truthful or not. In this way, historical doubt is extended beyond the acute situation of the Drake/Norkie conundrum, toward the shame and confusion that haunts the post-colonial, post-apartheid world at large.
