VISUAL ARTIST // SCULPTOR // MOTHER // VISUAL ARTIST // SCULPTOR // VISUAL ARTIST // SCULPTOR // MOTHER // VISUAL ARTIST // SCULPTOR // VISUAL ARTIST // SCULPTOR // MOTHER // VISUAL ARTIST // SCULPTOR // MOTHER // VISUAL ARTIST // SCULPTOR // MOTHER //

CREATING FROM A POLITCIALLY CHARGED SPACE // CREATING FROM A POLITCIALLY CHARGED SPACE // CREATING FROM A POLITCIALLY CHARGED SPACE // CREATING FROM A POLITCIALLY CHARGED SPACE // CREATING FROM A POLITICALLY // CREATING FROM A POLITICALLY // CREATING FROM A POLITICALLY // CREATING FROM A POLITICALLY

NEGOTIATING EXISTENCE // CELEBRATING RESILIENCE // NEGOTIATING EXISTENCE // NEGOTIATING EXISTENCE // CELEBRATING RESILIENCE // NEGOTIATING EXISTENCE // NEGOTIATING EXISTENCE // CELEBRATING RESILIENCE // NEGOTIATING EXISTENCE //

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Mary Sibande is a multidisciplinary visual artist working through the mighty medium of story creation. Combining sculpture, photography, and installation, her craft involves the delicate extrication of detail; lifting threads of history to weave an immersive world of mutable perspective.
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Using her body as a canvas, Sibande casts life-size sculptures which personify her alter-ego, Sophie, a mythical figure conjured to inhabit an imagined world where the roles of black women in post-Apartheid South Africa are considered and transformed.
Sophie moves through contemporary history in a braid of phases, drawing from the experience of the artist’s maternal line.
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Sibande’s work explores matters of personal and collective identity, championed by the idea that the personal is the political; that we are each, as individuals, our collective historical experience.
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Colour underpins three phases of exploration:
each phase cradles a body of work breathing past, present, and future.

Blue

Purple

Red

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The importance of colour in Sibande’s work lies not only in the strength of its visual symbolism, but in its role in political language.
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Her installations depict kinetic scenes —paused and encapsulated in gesture. A woman in dialogue with herself and the world, and a communion of colour, textile, and symbolism.
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While her lens is focused on inequality and oppression, particularly themes of sexism, racism, labour, and classism in post-Apartheid South Africa, Sibande’s mind’s eye is forward-facing, seeking transformation and change.
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Sibande offers a perspective in flux. A surreal dance between violence and beauty, time and space, the impossible and the possible.
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Black women still bear the weight of violence and subjugation —the seemingly inescapable centuries-old colonial narrative; an institution of limitations that Sibande works to dismantle.
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© 2022 Mary Sibande
by eleven11.