J-BAC 2025 - High School 2nd Place Winner - Mienke Brits - Echoes of Ancestry

Artist: Mienke Brits

Artwork Title: Echoes of Ancestry

Size: 650mm x 500mm

Meduim: Graphite pencil

Framed 

Artist Bio:

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” – Thomas Merton

My name is Mienke Brits, a Grade 12 learner and Head girl of High school Nico Malan in Humansdorp. As the top of my class in Visual Arts, my work reflects a lifelong devotion to creativity and expression. Art has never been just a subject to me, it has been the rhythm of my life, shaping how I see the world and my place within it.

My earliest memories of art began with colouring

printed pages my mom printed for me, and hours spent immersed in Top Model books. What started as a pastime soon became a passion, growing into a love for drawing, sculpting, and graphic design.

Apart from drawing, sculpting grounds me in texture and form, while graphic design pushes my creativity into the digital realm. Together, these practices reflect the duality of my artistic voice, which is rooted in tradition, yet always reaching forward.

For me, art is where silence speaks, and vision becomes reality.

Through my work, I move beyond the surface of familiar faces to capture the unseen stories within them. This piece is not just about Jeffrey’s Bay as a place, but about its people and their layered identities, unspoken traditions, and cultural echoes that shape who they are.

I have always been fascinated by the diversity of cultures surrounding us as they are often overlooked, softened into the background of daily life. To me, they deserve more than a passing glance; they deserve recognition and a space to be seen. This portrait is my tribute to that richness.

By magnifying subtle details like an heirloom, a gesture, a style, I seek to weave a dialogue between past and present, honouring the ancestral threads that still breathe through modern lives. For me, art is storytelling: a spiritual act that gives voice to silent pride, preserving heritage, identity, and belonging in every brushstroke.