Circus Lives, Spinning Truths, 2017

This work was completed during Victor’s 2017 residency at Mothership in Brooklyn, New York.

Diane Victor is renowned for her smoke drawings—a powerful technique that began as political commentary and has evolved into a nuanced visual language for telling diverse stories. The practice emerged from her depictions of Black African men and children: disembodied heads floating on white ground that compel closer investigation. The adult males reflected men imprisoned while awaiting trial – stuck in limbo. The children depicted were the missing, lost in a failing system. Victor creates these haunting images using fumage, drawing with smoke from a lit candle. The technique carries both symbolic and literal ephemerality—the slightest touch mars the surface irreparably, reflecting the precariousness of her subjects’ circumstances. Even the titles reinforce her subjects’ anonymity: they are numbers, not names.

Over two decades of practice, Victor has achieved extraordinary mastery of this delicate medium, expanding her repertoire to include animals native to South Africa and complex compositions combining human and animal forms. Her smoke drawings have been exhibited widely in the United States, France, and South Africa, and are held in major museum collections. The works remain a profound example of technique and meaning running in a tight conceptual circle—where the fragility of the medium embodies the vulnerability of those it portrays.

Click here to view a video of the artist’s process working with smoke.