Snelihle Maphumulo
Snelihle Maphumulo is South African artist, born and raised in Durban KZN. She is a 2024 Sasol New Signatures finalist and Merit Award winner. Maphumulo has exhibited her works at the 2023 and 2024 National Arts Festival where she also worked as a Gallery Custodian. She is a practicing artist whose work delves deep into the intersection of gender, tradition, material, and societal critique. Maphumulo decided to pursue art as a way to explore personal and cultural narratives, particularly how traditions evolve and maintain relevance over time. Her artistic journey became an avenue to express complex ideas about her identity, faith and history, all of which resonate deeply within Maphumulo's practice.
Sculpture, as a medium, has long been a space for three-dimensional exploration, allowing Maphumulo to manipulate and transform materials into tangible expressions of form, meaning, and metaphor. The tradition of working with found materials brings a unique dimension to her practice, as it involves recontextualizing objects that carry their own history.
Maphumulo's choice to work in sculpture stems from a fascination with form, texture, and the physicality of materials. The use of found materials, especially sheep hide and cow hide, draws from both personal and cultural experiences. These materials evoke ideas of heritage, religion, and the relationship between the natural world and human culture. Their organic qualities create a visceral connection to the past, while their manipulation within Maphumulo's sculptures speaks to contemporary narratives of adaptation, and transformation.
Maphumulo's work is a conversation between material, tradition, and society, constantly negotiating the boundaries of freedom and control. Through sculpture, Maphumulo invites viewers to question what is hidden, what is erased, and what continues to persist despite efforts to silence it.
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