Sasol New Signatures

Unspoken Sacrifice intimately exposes the invisible demands placed upon queer individuals within religious traditions. These demands often involve the sacrifice of natural desires. The work takes the form of a sculptural still life, with pyrolysed apples gathered into a burnt wooden bowl and placed on a cloth-covered altar.

The burnt wooden bowl serves as a vessel of offering, shaped by fire and scarred by transformation. It holds many of the sacrificed apples, but not all. Some have spilt out and rest on the altar, suggesting a burden too large to contain. The apples, which reference the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden, are transformed, stripped and sacrificed through pyrolysis. Their form is altered but still recognisable and somewhat beautiful, reflecting how these 'unnatural queer desires' cannot be erased.

The cloth beneath the bowl recalls liturgical spaces and sacred rituals. The altar does not demand spectacle. It bears witness to what is silently but also involuntarily expected, what is withheld, and what cannot be contained.

Unspoken Sacrifice speaks to the cost of spiritual belonging when it is tied to erasure.