This essay examines Frances Goodman’s PING! through the interplay of Lacanian psychoanalysis, digital semiotics, and ceramic materiality. It argues that Goodman’s ceramic emojis disrupt the ideological fantasy of digital transparency by relocating Unicode signifiers into an aesthetic frame where their meaning shifts from communicative clarity to theatrical artifice. Drawing on Dr. Roelof Petrus van Wyk’s curatorial statement, the essay situates Goodman’s work as a critique of
The protea as wound, desire, and refusal—This essay reads Bessie Head’s life through the protea metaphor, tracing how the art exhibition A PROTEA IS NOT A FLOWER at Zeitz MOCAA stages symbolic violence and its repetitions under apartheid, while her survival embodies the unresolved wound and the renewal of Symbolic Desire—an order always to be reimagined, always to come.
