Ep.20 Yolanda Mazwana

YOLANDA MAZWANA

Mazwana says, “I paint unusual formative characters to connect the dots about the questions around the female body, and what it goes through. I vent about the vulnerabilities of the mind, the emotions, the reproductive system and how our physical and physiological responses to trauma affect us. How our bodies respond to medications and the things that go misdiagnosed, the things that are going to be dismissed and forgotten, the things we have to protect ourselves from. The things we choose to keep hidden, to be healed and protected.”

Yolanda Mazwana is a self-taught artist based in Johannesburg ,South Africa. Her work addresses themes around mental illness, phobias, popular culture, and relationships. The painter synthesises elements of abstract expressionism, neo-expressionism and symbolism. Mazwana’s series ‘Symptoms of Nothing’ (2019) uses colour and texture to mimic the ambiguous experiences of a person suffering from hypochondria. This symbolic use of colour and texture speaks to the idea that the hypochondriac is not necessarily aware of what exactly it is they are experiencing or why.

The body of work presented in her first solo exhibition ‘Secret Homegirls’ (2019) centres around the observation of the agoraphobic secret homegirls. In the same year Mazwana received The Bag Factory Young Woman Studio Bursary, Johannesburg, and in 2020, she was awarded the second prize for the Emerging Painting Invitational Prize, Harare, Zimbabwe. She has recently participated in the NIROX Foundation Artist Residency as well as THE FOURTH Artist Residency Programme in South Africa.

Her work has been shown at various public as well as private destinations in South Africa and Berlin, Germany.

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