I’ve Come to Take You Home

EXHIBITION

I’ve Come to Take You Home

This work is a memorial, a homecoming, and a reckoning.

I’ve Come to Take You Home honours the late Dr. Diana Ferrus (29 August 1953 – 30 January 2026) — South African poet, storyteller, scholar, and lifelong voice for the dispossessed. Her 1998 poem of the same name, written for Sarah Baartman, became one of the most consequential acts of creative resistance in post-apartheid history: its words moved a government, crossed an ocean, and helped bring Sarah Baartman’s remains home to South Africa in 2002. Dr. Ferrus proved, irrevocably, that a poem can change the world.

Donovan responds in kind — image meeting word, paint meeting legacy.

Rendered in layered oils, acrylic, and charcoal, the portrait burns with the warm golds and deep oranges of late afternoon light — the colours of warmth, of endurance, of arrival. A full-face portrait is subtly overlaid upon a profile silhouette: two visions of the same woman, present and remembered, speaking and silent, here and carried forward.