Humanity Unite

These were the words of our late father, repeated to us time and again while he was alive. He didn’t just say them - he lived them. And there was a powerful reason why he insisted on this message with such conviction.

Our father was invited to South Africa to teach glass art at the University of Johannesburg. This took place in the early 1980s, when apartheid in South Africa was at its height - a brutal, institutionalised system of racial segregation that the United Nations rightly condemned as a “crime against humanity.”

The experience of apartheid’s cruelty haunted him until his final days. Every time he spoke about the injustice he had witnessed, his whole body shook with anger. His trauma left a permanent mark on our family and taught us that all people must be treated equally—a simple and obvious principle, yet in his time, and still today, it remains far from reality.

Even as children, we thought, “Someday, we want to meet the people of Africa!”
That hope kept motivating us until one day in 2010, with the support and help of our dear artist friend Xander Ferreira, we were able to visit the beautiful continent of Africa for the first time and collaborate with craft communities in the townships of South Africa.

Unfortunately, due to our lack of experience and ability, we were only able to continue the collaboration for a couple of years.

This defeat has been looming over us like a dark cloud for more than a decade…
But we are now finally back with Xander Ferreira and this time also with Harris Elliott to reengage with our deep desire to work with the people of Africa.

We are writing this post from Ghana and will be traveling on to South Africa to work with amazing artisans in both nations.

This post includes images from back in 2010 (still young and naive ha ha), and from today onward, we’ll be sharing the revival of our “Africa Project”!