During her artists residency at Admirals residence in Muizenberg, South Africa, Hugo sought to create art exploring the concepts of immersing and emerging within the contemporary figure and environment. Throughout her stay she reacted to the Displacement and Conviviality title of Admiral's prior residents. Her personal work involved the depiction of individuals going through physical or emotional displacement, and how it affects their identity and sense of belonging. The residency concluded with a joint exhibition at the residence, with host and artist Gerrit Handl, titled Immerse/Emerge.

On the heels of her residency exhibition, a separate exhibition titled Emerged/Revealed, shown on her return to Pretoria, consisted of work conceived during Hugo's art residency stay as well as work that closely preceded and seeded it. Her resulting search for conviviality in a world of widely displaced people led her yet again to question and resist most modern and traditional notions of that which constitutes value in human beings as well as other living organisms.

Hands form a strong symbol of empathy in this body of work and can be traced back to the "hand as token for person killed" ruling, during the historical rubber trade era in the Congo Free State (1906), as well as frequent dismemberments which always accompany conflicts, wars and genocides across our globe.
The importance and significance of "being the hands and feet of Christ on earth", is unthinkingly professed in contemporary Christian teaching, whilst members are being ripped off bodies of undervalued people, and members of the human race are ripped from societies, on the screens of our smart phones, every day.

Hence, not only does this exhibition address displacement, but also physical and metaphorical dismemberment. As a follower of Christ and brought up in a protestant Christian home, Hugo could not reconcile the apathy in, for example, South African reformed churches and even sometimes, the support, for example, from American evangelical churches, of the genocide and aggression enacted upon Palestine and surrounding countries, by a nation we have been tough to respect as a chosen people in our religious establishments. The conflict in the Middle East, caused a much belated personal paradigm shift in Hugo's pre-established ideologies.

The exhibition also address the displacement crisis in Africa, which is home to 9 out of the 10 countries in the world most affected by displacement today, because of wars, conflicts and climate change, and which results in vulnerable people being exposed to violence, famine, disease, and dispossession.

Although Hugo's work has always contained some form of social commentary, it never before had been intended to be politically charged, until now. In a fragmented world today, our best friends and family often turn into strangers and it is often risky to initiate dialogue concerning serious present-time events, no matter how urgent.

But:
"All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up." - James Baldwin.

Visually, the exhibition is not provocative or disturbing, and Hugo has used only subtle cues in the images and titles to touch on the subject matter addressed. In many ways, this is a protest against our attention economy contemporary culture, which can cause atrocities to be quickly over looked or normalised and for words, numbers and visual content, to loose their potency. A return to subtlety should not be experienced as an indication of subject matter less grievous. Rather, it is an invitation to the viewer to stop, pay attention and spend precious time to unravel the meaning of the artworks