Abigail Nel
Abigail Nel (B.1999) is a Johannesburg based artist working with photography and printmaking. They completed BA in Visual Art at the University of Johannesburg in 2021. Abigail completed Through The Lens Collective’s Mid-level Photography Course in 2022. Abigail is currently working through the Advanced Photography Course and interning at Through The Lens Collective. Their practice investigates the photographic discipline which is made through analogue processes such as black&white film and pinhole image-making. Their work embodies introspection on themes of memory, home, and coming of age.
Awayscape was created in a Johannesburg inner city suburb in 2023, where I have lived since childhood. It is an emotive response to colliding circumstances, a breakup and death, which shifted my perception of everything, very little seems familiar anymore.
In plain sight, you could tell the rupture was bound to happen.
In the blink of an eye, disconnection is disclosed, and your distance felt.
That’s that.
Except, emotional wounds remain.
I gather the pieces to attempt reconstruction of everything I have known up until now.
These fragments don’t make sense anymore.
An unresolved conversation lingers in the air.
The images are my response to this new changed mental reality in a space that I have grown up in. The use of the pinhole and analogue photography was used to emphasise the limited control we have of life.
