Deathly artwork birthed powerful feelings

Artist and forensic practitioner explains why Paul Stopforth’s

ELEGY is a postmortem portrait of South African Black Consciousness activist Bantu Stephen Biko by Paul Stopforth. It is executed in graphite powder painstakingly polished into layers of Cobra floor wax from which countless hair-fine excisions excavate the figure from its ground.

Measuring 149cm x 240cm – near life-size – it hovers between drawing, photography, sculpture and painting, demonstrating kinship with all these media and yet claiming a singular materiality.

The work was completed in 1980, three years after Biko’s death in police custody. It was bought by the Durban Art Gallery in 1981, where I first encountered it as a child.

I have a distinct recollection of being drawn towards the surface of this phantom image. Of it filling my child-self ’s visual field from above as I tried to make sense not of what, but how it was: it was obvious to me that whoever this man was, he was not asleep. And why did the light in the picture seem so off, seeping out from this body’s darkest parts like a photograph gone wrong?

As with the series of smaller, more fugitive drawings of Biko’s hands and feet that preceded this monumental study, Elegy was made with direct reference to the forensic photographs of his postmortem examination, given to Stopforth by the Biko family’s lawyer. There can be no doubt that it borrows from religious iconography, presenting Biko as a secular martyr.

Art historian Shannen Hill sug-