Notes

Themba Shabalala, a contemporary South African artist born in 1994, An totem award winner in 2015 and currently based in Johannesburg in an art community called August House, Themba Shabalala has a formal discipline
in printmaking and his predominantly engaged with the medium of fire and wood. He is currently exploring the concept of self-image; and mainly reflecting back into his upbringing and his battle with an absent
father figure. His work shows how he chooses to carry the aspects his mother has taught him and learn to overlook his father’s physical absence. His work has been featured in a number of group exhibitions and auctioned.
Shabalala is one of the nine artists elected in Africa for a prestigious World Art Print in France.

“This body of work focuses on self-retrospection and self-introspection. I seek to portray all the struggles, adjustments and beauty in the shadows of the ugliest situations that I went through, through the phases of the pandemic. Reflecting and rediscovering oneself in the state of isolation and emotional dependence. This body of work has allowed me to reincarnate all my struggles and burdens to cope, to cope with a loss of my right eye sight, to cope with a pressure of being newly a father and being able to self-sustain and to provide for my family. In this process I disintegrate the material, one will call it damaging but it is I deconstructing to construct, wounding to heal, evoking the problem for solutions and dissecting deep into the layers of the material to find truth. The whole process is a catharsis and in a global context the work is exploring the ambiguities of life. From there I use one of the destructive element called fire to burn the surface of the material to construct an image. This is to convey that the worst situations in life can bring the best out of us. This work focuses on mother nature which conveys the significance of a woman in nature or her essence. The essence of nurturing the seed from the womb and bearing fruits is the sustainability of an ecological system. The halo depicts the royalty of her inner
self exuberant as a crown of enlightenment and serenity like photosynthesis her light allows her to blossom with beauty and a gentle sense of being present with oneself. She is growing within herself and all within her is an articulation of her nature.”