My practice is grounded in painting as a means of exploring home, exile, and spiritual interiority within the Black body. Through figurative compositions, I depict moments of prayer, reflection, and quiet withdrawal, using stillness as a way to engage movement, transition, and becoming. Painting allows me to sit with the image slowly, mirroring the internal processes of faith, doubt, and self-reclamation that shape the work.
Christianity occupies a layered position within my practice. While acknowledging its colonial arrival in African contexts, I am interested in how faith is reinhabited and reinterpreted as a source of grounding and refuge. In my paintings, prayer functions as an intimate space, a ‘temporary’ home where the subject exists beyond external judgment and imposed narratives.
The figures I paint navigate the tension between belonging and displacement, where exile is experienced through visibility, colorism, and inherited histories. Yet within these conditions, the body becomes a site of return. My work reflects an ongoing movement toward home as something internal, fragile, and continually rebuilt through faith, memory, and self-recognition.
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Itumeleng Mtshali is a visual artist from Thabazimbi and Polokwane, Limpopo, who resides in Johannesburg. Black identity, colourism, Christianity, and the continuous process of self-acceptance are all explored in Itumeleng’s work, which has its roots in personal memory, spirituality, and social critique. She explores how childhood, community, and surroundings influence a person’s sense of self through painting and mixed media. Her most recent work reclaims faith as a place of affirmation, healing, and belonging by reflecting on the beauty and tension inherent in the cohabitation of Christianity with Blackness. Emotional honesty, cultural reclamation, and narrative are the main themes of her work. Her goal is to produce art that not only captures her personal experience but also provides a space for others to view themselves clearly and compassionately.
