Kobo ya Thuto, 2025
Lithography on Fabriano, Edition 1 of 5
80 cm x 61 cm
Artist’s Statement
Kobo ya Thuto is a colour lithograph that explores the tangible dimensions of what an image can hold beyond representation. Referencing a photograph of my grandmother whom I was named after, yet never had the opportunity to meet. The work approaches the image as a site of encounter. Through it, I seek not only to imagine her presence, but to understand myself in relation to her.
Central to my current art practice is the Sepedi proverb, leina le lebe ke seromo (“a bad name is an omen”), which informs my ongoing artistic inquiry into how we come to see, know, and inherit ourselves through lineage, language, and cultural memory. In this work, I shift attention away from the face and towards attire. Presented as a framed and faded archive, the traditional Sepedi dress becomes a material witness to continuity across time. Despite the passing of generations, its persistence allows it to carry memory, embody identity, and mediate presence.
Through a process I describe as a “descent into the image,” I move beyond the photograph as documentation and into it as a space of relation. The lithographic surface becomes a threshold through which absence and proximity coexist. Encountering my grandmother through the traces embedded in dress and image, I simultaneously encounter myself as an extension of her lineage, shaped by inherited histories and guided by spiritual continuities that exceed direct memory.
