Bones and Roots is a series of pencil drawings made in the 1990s, during a period of research into indigenous knowledge and animal medicine in the muti shops of South Africa. As a white South African, de Villiers makes no claim to indigenous knowledge; her interest lay in the fetish value of these materials — the belief that the magical properties of an animal or object might transfer to the one who wears or uses it.

Drawn from dried and desiccated specimens — a chameleon, tortoises, a rat — and from the fibrous tangle of roots, the works also trace an enduring thread in her practice: a fascination with organic structure, with how things are made, and with the fibrous networks that bind them together — an interest rooted in the histories of women’s work and making.