Artist 316
Phumzile Buthelezi
Textile visual Narrative
Phumzile Buthelezi (born 1976) is a South African artist who specializes in collages and sculptures. She infuses textiles to create images of women because she believes that women have lived in depravity collecting our own stories.
She has a tactile visual aesthetic using her self taught skills and life experiences to create her visual narrative. Her craft includes embroidery, crocheting, knitting, bead-work, and fabric painting.
Her art process consists of cutting her artistic prints into different shapes and sizes guided by her preparatory drawings and studies. She then stitches them together using a manual sewing machine, giving to life innovative imagery and complex visual texture.
Her visual imagery is filled organic forms and shapes and colorful palettes.
Phumzile is an upcylcist, she uses recyclable materials in most of her works which is a product of her personal social-economic position as an woman who must bear the responsibilities of being a mother and wife. As an upcyclist she uses discarded materials to use her creative energy for socio-economic benefit.
Her present work aims to break conventional practice in the industry by continuing to reflect on narratives of black women, through her own experiences.
She invokes women and feminine energy as her muse. She explores the sense of being associated and connected with nature and simultaneously being a critical site in cultural production and particularly the change in practicing agency. Especially the indicative agency of social, political and cultural changes as a driving force.
Her body of work is a physical extension of philosophy and cultural changes that have made the modern woman a multifaceted being, a bringing together of many different qualities and textures; through the use of different mediums and technical skills.
Her belief in stories is her motivation for using her work to uplift women and uplift herself, her own daughter and the daughters of other women. Despite the difficulties of the stories, Buthelezi is determined to change the status quo through her pieces.
Sources Consulted: