The culmination of this period was the creation of a champlevé that later became a symbolic point of reference in my photographic series Unbecoming (2024–2025).

The piece depicts a simplified landscape: dunes and mountains meeting at the horizon, with a red stone embedded between them to represent the sun. This visual connection between desert and mountain gestures toward my movement from Namibia (The Namib Desert) to Cape Town (Table Mountain) — a journey that continues to shape my understanding of origin, belonging, and transformation.

The silversmithing process became a metaphor for shaping and refining the self — each hammer mark, melt, and polish echoing the emotional and physical labour embedded in identity formation. The slow rhythm of craft contrasted with the immediacy of photography, teaching me to see making as an embodied act of becoming.

What began as an experiment in material curiosity ultimately redefined how I approach photography: not as surface image-making, but as a practice deeply rooted in touch, transformation, and process.

This period of experimentation directly informed the visual and conceptual framework of Unbecoming (2024–2025) — both in its symbolism and in its attention to tactility and texture.

The champlevé’s interplay of metal, light, and reflection mirrors the layered surfaces of my self-portraiture, bridging craft and image into a shared language of making.