I'm the King of the Castle was produced in 1997 for Purity and Danger, an exhibition curated by artist Penny Siopis. Artists and public personalities were invited to respond to what might loosely be called taboo in contemporary South Africa, a society undergoing intensive social change. We were asked to consider notions of ‘good or bad’, ‘right or wrong’, ‘decent and indecent’. In that context, this work focused on the universally problematic terrain of representation and child sexuality and the equally taboo realm of the representation of the eroticism and intimacy inherent to the mother and child relationship.

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In half of the grid of 40 images, my (then) 6 year old son was naked, which became controversial and the focus of public response to the work (and nearly 10 years later, people who meet me for the first time still say – “Oh, you’re that artist who takes pictures of her children without their clothes on ! “). To my mind, they were quite ‘achy’ images of a little boy performing himself for his mother, trying on different versions of masculinity, and, of himself.

The work really disturbed some people and others loved and were moved by it. In retrospect, I think the disturbance had quite deep social roots. At the time I was reading Marianne Hirsch’s book, Family Frames, and in a chapter titled Maternal Exposures (which title I later borrowed for a new work) she writes about how usually, children have desires to which mothers respond. And, in terms of the theory out there with regard to how children acquire subjectivity, culture values a maternity that casts an enabling and mirroring look at the child, supporting the child's subject formation. The notion of mutual recognition, and mutual desire (his imaged by the photographs, and mine suggested by the fact that I took them) is very threatening and unsettling. Perhaps this is why some people found the work objectifying and even dangerous to the children. But it certainly stimulated lively and polarised responses that got me thinking about what these photographs meant to me and how they are so intensely linked to the retrieval of lost objects – that Barthes ‘moment of ‘death’ where family photographs become visual records of absence and death rather than presence and life; memorials to love, loss and longing. That’s a thread that continues to run through my work - the relationship between visual records and absence.