Maitemogelo Diphetogo Mphela

Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa

Artist statement

My practice explores how emotional experience becomes structure. Working primarily through abstraction and mixed media, I use painting, drawing, stitching, found and recycled materials, and installation to build visual forms of mapping: as ways of giving shape to experiences that are difficult to articulate directly. I work intuitively and process-led, allowing materials, gestures and fragments to accumulate, interrupt and transform one another. Layering, erasure, cutting, joining and stitching become ways of thinking through uncertainty, change and the ongoing process of becoming. I am particularly interested in the tension between fragmentation and coherence: what happens when something is broken apart, reoriented, held together or allowed to remain unresolved. The resulting works sit between emotional mapping and material investigation. They are records of attention as much as finished objects; they are spaces where instinct, memory and embodied experience can take form. Through this process, I explore the possibility of making as a way of returning to oneself, by learning how to move, hold, adjust and continue.

Artwork