Cradles - Valiani Salimah

Cradles is a collection on the nature(s) and nurturing that cradle us. Womb, the first section, is the first cradle, both ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, under-acknowledged and often unmentioned. Beyond the grand and intricate physical womb of individuals, there are collective wombs that incubate on yet grander and greater scales. In Land(s), the second section, the cradles we typically identify as our ‘origins.’ but as the Cradle of Humankind in present day South Africa teaches, the many lands of today are interlaced in concealed ways and originated in a single, little understood place. Tides are explored in the third section: the physical migrations and cycles of time that shape us. Tides can shift, upset and remake the nurturing of cradles; they also cradle us in cycles of wreckage. Wind, the final section, sets us free of places and times of origin. This detachment can bring freedom, a sense of loss/lostness, and the many things in between. The freedom/loss/lostness spiral whirls with the wind and transforms. in surrendering we can alter its pace to our needs and desires.