Sakhiwo Tshabalala: Artist feature

Sakhiwo Tshabalala is an emerging practicing visual artist and MA Fine Art: Painting student at Camberwell College of Art.

Hailing from the city of Johannesburg, South Africa, from an early age Sakhiwo grew up consistently in creative spaces, from the graffiti on the many walls of Soweto, where he spent his formative years growing up, to the boys choir music boarding schools he attended through his adolescent years.

Sakhiwo's painting practice explores the relationship between imagination, memory and the construction of alternative realities. Interested by how an image that has never physically existed can become believable through painting, and how a viewer might temporarily surrender their understanding of ordinary reality to enter the reality established by the work. A process described as “Meditative Daydreaming”. A space between deliberate thought and free, unbound consciousness where intuition, memory, perception and imagination can coexist.

Sakhiwo's practice is informed by two interconnected contexts. The first being childhood experience growing up in Soweto where graffiti, painted walls, patterned textiles, township architecture, television, cartoons, anime and manga contributed to the visual language he absorbed. And the second being the contemporary context of imaginative world-building within painting, particularly the use of fantasy, narrative and alternative realities to revisualise and reconsider lived experience.

The physicality of paint is therefore important to his practice because it transforms an internal, intangible thought into an object that another person can encounter, interpret and enter through surrendering.

Creative work ethic has always been at the epitome of Sakhiwo's core creative identity. Sakhiwo's work centres around concepts and themes of an imaginative visual experience and colourful narrative through the romanticisation and expressive imaginative visualisation of life experiences.

Through a dynamic interplay of acrylic painting, silkscreen printing, digital landscapes, Sakhiwo's work emerges as a vivid exploration of memory, imagination, and storytelling. By blending these artistic mediums, he creates saturated, colourful worlds that reflect his subconscious visual thought processes, narrative driven and expressive dreamlike image making.

Connect with Sakhiwo

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