Bougaard is a Johannebsurg-based artist who uses explorations of language, childhood games and artisanal papermaking to speak about hybrid identities in post-apartheid South Africa. In particular, her work deconstructs and re-examines notions of “Coloured” identity, unpicking the cultural traces and practices that have been, and still are, associated with “Colouredness” today.
The term “Coloured” is an apartheid-era racial classification used to refer to individuals of mixed racial heritage. Bougaard proposes an alternative version of the word “Coloured”, the phonetically approximate “Kullid”, as a liberating creolisation of the bureaucratic language of apartheid. Rather than a new way of categorising individuals according to their race, Bougaard sees the word “Kullid” as a linguistic vessel for her own lived experience of hybrid identity. In her work she activates and acknowledges the language Afrikaaps (a dialect related to Afrikaans), specifically using phrases from the slang dialect Gamtaal, which is associated with the “Coloured” community of the Cape Flats, near Cape Town.
Bougaard works fluidly between sculpture, sound, installation and papermaking, allowing the conceptual demands of the work to dictate the medium. Her handmade paper works bring together millions of fibres of mixed origin, a metaphor for the almost limitless plurality of Kullid experience. Her sculptures capture culturally resonant objects, such as Sunlight soap, Amala oil, Afrikaaps phrases, and wooden spoons, among others, which are then encased in resin. Through this process, she memorialises her everyday life.
Her most recent project was the two-person exhibition Us (with Zenaéca Singh) at Guns & Rain, from June to August 2023. In early 2023 Bougaard completed a Master of Fine Arts degree (Cum Laude) at the University of Johannesburg, exhibiting her final body of work in a solo show at the Origins Centre Museum at the University of the Witwatersrand (also in Johannesburg). In 2021, as part of her Honours in Fine Arts, Bougaard had a solo show at Constitution Hill. Prior to this she has shown her work in group shows with Guns & Rain (2021, 2022) and in the 2019 Sasol New Signatures Award exhibition.