Berni Searle utilizes large scale digital photographic prints, found materials, and time-based media such as film to capture her work. Searle’s work encompasses performative narratives and the self as a figure to embody history, land-memory and place. Searle is known for utilizing her own body in her pieces to highlight her own bodily agency and to construct and deconstruct identities around race and gender. Spices are a common motif in her work. Her series Colour Me is a body of work from 1998 to 2000 in which she outlines or adorns her body with different coloured spices and creates life-size or larger than life digital prints. The coloured spices allude to the racial classifications imposed under apartheid, and also the movement of both spices and slaves during colonial regimes. Many works in the Colour Me series also feature measuring tools, signifying the colonial, pseudoscientific gaze on black bodies. Her work deals with South African History, the awareness of one’s own skin colour, and the consumption of a woman’s body as a commodity; the confrontational power of that same body in which so many myths, desires, and necessities reside.
