Biography
Mary Sibande (1982) is a South African visual artist working across a variety of media, including sculpture, photography and printmaking. She received her B-Tech degree in Fine Art from the University of Johannesburg in 2007, and has since participated in multiple artists residencies across Europe and America, including the 2018-2019 Virginia C. Gildersleeve Professorship at Barnard College at Columbia University in New York, USA and the MAC/ VAL Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val- de-Marne in Paris, France in 2013. She won the Helgaard Steyn Prize for Sculpture in 2021, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Arts Award in 2017; and the 2013 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Arts.
Her work primarily explores how to reclaim the black female body in post-colonial and post-apartheid South Africa. Her work often portrays the artists alter-ego “Sophie”, a dreamer exploring worlds previously denied to her. She is many things, a domestic worker, a ruler, a general, a pope and more. Sophie is based upon Sibande herself, as well as the women in Sibande’s family, however, she is also a symbolic figure addressing many topics that remain relevant today, including blackness, femininity, labour and post-coloniality.
Sibande is co-founder of Occupying the Gallery, a project that aims to transform gallery spaces into makeshift open studios for mentorship and artistic development.
Collaboration History
In late 2023, the David Krut Workshop (DKW) was approached by Mary Sibande to collaborate as part of The Occupy the Gallery mentorship programme. The aim of the programme was to introduce a number of different artists from different backgrounds to the world of printmaking. As a collective the artists would occupy a space, create work in that space and then showcase the work, moving through the different aspects of print and workshops as they go.
At David Krut Workshop, Sbongiseni Khulu took on the role of collaborator with Mary Sibande, Hoek Swaratlhe and Lusanda Ndita. Through a series of discussions Khulu and Sibande isolated relief as the one medium she hadn’t fully explored yet.
In April of 2024, Sibande actively began her collaboration with DKW, working with Khulu on a woodblock print approx. 105 x 76 cm in size. Ash wood was chosen for it’s high durability. In it’s production and repetitive reproduction, Mary drew and collaged various versions of her famed character “Sophie”. Once the image had came into its key components it was then transferred onto the wood and carved by hand for a total of 7 weeks. That said, Khulu made it a point to translate each carved mark exactly as it was in the final image such that her hand was not lost in the collaboration, which hadn’t met its conclusion yet. Sibande and Khulu would go on to explore printing onto various multicolored pieces of paper for collage, as well as mixing oil-based monotype layers with woodcut to highlight aspects of the character. In true Sibande fashion the colour combinations used in all of the explorations involved different shades of the colour blue.