The orange field, Namaqua National Park, September 2016

There were millions of them swaying on long slender stalks in the wind. They were called glans-ogies (or shining-eyes) and differed only in minuscule ways from the buttercups, beetle daisies or Namaqualand daisies which we discovered later on during our trip. At that stage, they were just orange daisies, to us. But something changed for them and that is what I want to write about.

The heat of that early spring day, when we hiked along fields of colour, was intense and the sun drenched the very colour out of all of us. But we bravely battled the light with our aperture and exposure settings as we aimed at the daisies around us and then we found them, the ones hidden in our shadow and suddenly all kinds of contrasts broke out right in front of us.

We had stepped into a world where orange glowed deeper, white was brighter and darkness separated itself from the light to be by itself.

Long afterwards that moment still lingered unresolved for me. How could the presence of darkness manifest color in such a majestic way?

Back home, I had to test that theory on my pots. I chose the same yellow and white to be my small color patches and placed them in a sun drenched field. I then covered them in shadow and out of the darkness colour stood up again and brightly smiled at me.

Selfie of us, 28 x 15 cm on porcelain