The Santiago Cross: Invisible Trade, draws upon and extends concerns developed in the video installation To Be King. The painting Las Meninas by Diego Velásquez (1565) and a subsequent essay on the painting by Michel Foucault (1966) were the impetus for To Be King in which the intersecting vectors between power and and the gaze of the king was reframed in the landscape of the Eastern Cape, South Africa.

The Santiago Cross: Invisible Trade, recontexualises images drawn from the stop-frame animation component of the To be King installation through the lens of ‘trade’. The images reveal the process of production. Ink rollers, scissors, rags and turpentine, the tools of the trade, are made visible. These objects are comparable to Velasquez’s deliberate exposure of his palette and paintbrush. The dialectical relationship between the actual (the tools) and the imaginary (the depicted image) extends the gaze of the artist from behind her easel to deliberately reveal the labour of art and the trade between the visible and invisible.