Marigold is privileged to have worked on this collaboration with Pippa Skotnes, artist and Professor Emerita at the University of Cape Town. 

​

In the 1860s, German philologist Wilhelm Bleek, working in Cape Town, engaged |xam men and women as language instructors and pioneered a specific inventory of symbols and diacritics to depict the sound of its clicks and tones. This process is recorded in the thousands of pages of word lists and stories continued in the 1870s, aided by his collaborator Lucy Lloyd, and shows both change over time and the subtleties of pronunciations in various |xam dialects.

​

Bleek’s inventory of symbols is still largely used today and the complexity of them allows us some sense of the sound of a language now no longer spoken.

​

The Marigold beadwork translations show versions of the changing symbols, including the special clicks for the speech of animals. The symbols, along with the scribblings and scratchings, ink blots and underlining, disclose thought made visual.

​

Rooted in valuing and giving tangible form to fading histories, this collaboration carries references to the sounds of disappearing and lost languages.