KAMVA MATUIS

In trying to find a beginning of this work I was quick to jump and of my initiation but there was a “ me ” before that . Tracing back I went torwards my upbringing in Burgersdorp which is a contrast to the world I find myself . Even in thinking with Burgersdorp there was still questions sending me backwards and with . To try and isolate this work to my race would be a lie . To try and isolate to being Xhosa would also be a lie . To isolate it with painting and my struggles with academia would also be a lie . It’s been a search for self knowing well death exists . It’s my flirtation with the apocalypse. My attraction to cold carcasses once full of life .

My practice utilizes figurative oil painting to stage complex encounters between the past and the present, intimacy and distance, and the personal and the collective. Rather than directly documenting lived experience, my work is a deeply introspective negotiation with the external world and the social atmosphere of post-apartheid South Africa. I am deeply engrossed with the ‘hangovers’ and lingering remnants of slavery, colonialism, and spatial planning within rural, pastoral, and urban communities. Within my compositions, recurring motifs like old brown furniture, totems of animal bones, and hidden symbolic objects serve as an archive of historical weight. I view skin as both material and metaphor, a site where vulnerability and dignity converge. Ultimately, I treat the surface of the canvas as a therapeutic space to utter the unutterable, pose troublesome questions, and explore how memory is actively carried and felt within the contemporary human body.