Collaborative printer: Kim-Lee Loggenberg-Tim
Written by: Lungile Ngcobo
In the evolving landscape of contemporary printmaking, Phumulani Ntuli’s Wish List series emerges as a reflective meditation on longing, memory, and material culture. Developed in collaboration with collaborative printer Kim-Lee Loggenberg-Tim at David Krut Workshop, this ongoing body of work (March 2025–present) marks a new chapter in Ntuli’s multidisciplinary practice.
Ntuli’s practice moves fluidly between collage, animation, and printmaking, often interrogating how images are made, stored, and remembered. Wish List extends this inquiry into the surroundings of consumer desire and digital aspiration. Each work operates simultaneously as archive and reflection, collecting fragments of visual and material culture to reveal how personal longing is shaped by social expectations and online economies.
Through a combination of found imagery, handwritten notes, online advertisements, and intimate symbols of want, Ntuli constructs speculative inventories of desire that are part diary and part dataset. His collages trace the tension between need and fantasy, utility and decoration, and self and society, creating a visual map of how we curate and consume our dreams.
Formally, Wish List engages with layering, opacity, and repetition, echoing the accumulation of digital wish lists that grow quietly in our online lives. Materials such as wrapping paper, receipts, printed screenshots, and discarded packaging are reconfigured into compositions that blur the boundaries between the tangible and the virtual. The result is a tactile, yet conceptual exploration of how the digital and material intertwine in shaping memory and aspiration.
As Kim-Lee Loggenberg-Tim notes, the Wish List series represents a shift in Ntuli’s visual language. While his earlier monotypes were large and densely layered, these new prints are smaller, more intimate, and marked by a sense of restraint. Working on square Perspex plates printed on half sheets of paper, Ntuli limits his palette to two or three tones, introducing only minimal chine-collé.
Ntuli’s process is one of constant layering and reimagining. He constructs his prints using pronto-lithography cutouts, oil monotype, chine-collé, and collage, allowing figures and environments to emerge organically from fragments. After an initial period of focusing on these smaller prints, Ntuli returned to his large-scale monotypes before revisiting Wish List in October, refining the works with Loggenberg-Tim’s guidance. The completed pieces are brought to life through delicate watercolour handwork and intricate collage detailing, adding a quiet intensity to their pared-down forms.
Ultimately, Wish List is more than a print series; it is a living archive of aspiration, a visual diary that mirrors the complex relationship between desire, materiality, and memory in the digital age. Through his collaboration with Kim-Lee Loggenberg-Tim, Ntuli has created a body of work that feels both personal and universal, ephemeral and enduring an eloquent reflection on the ways we collect, imagine, and remember what we wish for.
