Swaline Mkhonto (b. 2002, Johannesburg) is a South African artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans printmaking, installation, material exploration, and writing. Rooted in process, her work engages with land as a site of memory, fragmentation, and transformation. Her practice considers the ways in which material, place, and language can hold traces of lived experience and histories that are often difficult to articulate.
Through materials such as pulp, silk, copper, and Perspex, Mkhonto explores how language and listening can emerge from the land itself, treating objects—whether living or inert—as carriers of stories. Her works often emerge through a process of experimentation, allowing materials to guide and shape the development of ideas. In this way, she creates spaces for reflection, paying attention to subtle forms of communication between people, objects, and their surroundings. Mkhonto describes her practice as “a place where fragmentation resides, slowly allowing myself to listen to the quietness in which it speaks.”