Omphemetse Ramatlhatse

Omphemetse Patient Ramatlhatse is a Black Woman art practitioner who holds a BA honours degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand (2020). She is a painter, illustrator, writer, and layout designer. Omphemetse is currently based between Soweto and Kokotela, Lawley, a new community birthed through "Land grabs".

Her practice investigates, interrogates, confronts the relationship between Blackness and life. She explores the relationship between Being and Moving and occupying space and Being occupied by space and what we leave behind and what is left behind in us. She explores the possibilities that lie in the uncomfortable conversations we have (with ourselves) when we are confronted by the realities of what remains behind.

Through unpacking the consequences of history as it unfolds while forging and weaving new threads of Being. She feels an urgent responsibility to make holes into the "invisible" walls that have been systematically structured to kill us. She, like many of her peers, are ripples in history and the rings preceding us, and the ones coming after us, are the living consequences of a history of imbalance. We are the generation that is still burdened with bridging the gaps of economic, political, physiological and other consequences which we find ourselves in because of the history of our country.

Access to knowledge, in its variants, is a privilege she believes we all deserve as birth right, so we are well equipped to make informed choices; to dream more, to thus create and manifest reflections of ourselves.