Mother’s Bloom - FNB Art Joburg 2025

Zandile Tshabalala

Glitter Girl, Mother Star

by Nkosazana Zaza Hlalethwa

Glitter is dust that has learned to flirt with light. It is a constellation broken into fragments, each speck slipping through your fingers yet bright enough to catch the eye from across a room. It is neither solid nor liquid but a shimmer scattered, particles that shift their gleam depending on how you move or how the world moves around you. To wear it is to glow deliberately. To witness it is to be caught, momentarily, in the spell of sparkle.

It is with this same shimmer that Zandile Tshabalala approaches her practice, tethering herself to the body and rendering it radiant, insistent, and impossible to look away from. Her own body, drawn through portraiture, collage, and figuration, has become a site of introspection and resistance. Across her career, she has painted herself not only into visibility but into sovereignty: the figure unapologetically present, languid, searching, and refusing erasure. For Tshabalala, self-portraiture has never been only about likeness. It has been about insistence. To depict herself repeatedly has been to wrest the Black woman’s image from the histories that sought to consume it and to return it to the realm of desire, complexity, and self-possession.

With Mother’s Bloom, Tshabalala turns that gaze inward once more, this time through the prism of transformation. Unveiled for the first time in South Africa at the 18th edition of FNB Art Joburg, the body of work charts her passage into motherhood, with its ruptures, astonishments, and griefs. It asks what becomes of the artist when her body ceases to belong to her alone. It asks what becomes of creation when the act of making life precedes the act of making art.

During her pregnancy, Tshabalala recalls a profound dislocation. Her studio practice fell silent, her self-portraits faltered, and she felt herself slipping from the orbit of the art world. The pause carried both relief and dread. Relief in stepping outside the relentless demands of visibility. Dread in fearing she might be forgotten. Yet in the stillness, something germinated. When she eventually returned to painting, she found her former gestures estranged from her. The language she had honed no longer resonated with the self who had crossed the threshold into motherhood. What followed was not a resumption but a reckoning.

Her breakthrough came, fittingly, through intimacy. Repainting photographs from a day at the park with her daughter, she unlocked a new visual vocabulary, one adorned with glitter, rhinestones, and childlike exuberance. With these materials, so often dismissed as decorative or unserious, Tshabalala reclaimed the language of sparkle as one of abundance and devotion. Glitter became not embellishment but insistence, a refusal to mute the excesses of love, vulnerability, and joy. Rhinestones gleamed as markers of self-nurturing, jewels planted across the body like seeds in a garden. In embracing what some might call frivolous, Tshabalala offered a radical proposition: fine art can shimmer. Gravitas need not be sombre. The maternal can be baroque.

The singular figure remains central in Mother’s Bloom. Always her own likeness, it embodies both the solitude and fecundity of becoming. These portraits are not sentimentalised depictions of motherhood but allegories of the self in bloom. They bear the weight of change, adorned with blossoms, and sometimes shrouded in shadow. Works such as Falling into Oblivion, with its discoloured flamingo floaty and half-concealed figure, speak to the disorientation of personal transformation in a world that carries on regardless. Others, like And so shall it be, reach toward the spiritual, evoking the cosmic and ancestral dimensions of creation. Throughout, Tshabalala insists on ambiguity, resisting any single or literal reading. Instead, she renders the emotional landscapes of motherhood in forms that shimmer, conceal, and overwhelm.

In these canvases lies both grief and release. Tshabalala speaks of mourning her former self, recognising that she could never return to who she was before birth remade her. Yet acceptance brings clarity. Her practice, like her life, blooms only in step with her becoming. The lesson is both intimate and urgent. For women, for mothers, for artists, whose identities the world so often fragments or demands to be singular, Tshabalala’s work insists that one can be many things at once. Bold and fragile. Playful and rigorous. Mother and artist. Glitter girl and fine painter.

The urgency of Mother’s Bloom lies precisely here. At a time when contemporary art still polices the boundaries of seriousness, Tshabalala’s glitter and rhinestones destabilise the hierarchies of material and subject. She asks what it means to call something “craft,” what it means to dismiss adornment as childish, what it means to separate play from refinement. In her hands, these materials become conduits for a feminist, Black, and deeply personal redefinition of painting. They carry the force of joy, the audacity of self-belief, the refusal to dim one’s light in order to be taken seriously.

With Mother’s Bloom, Tshabalala does not simply return to painting. She reclaims it on her own terms. These works radiate a confidence hard-won through rupture, loss, and reconstitution. They declare that her artistry is inseparable from her life, that creativity is not diminished by motherhood but sharpened, expanded, and made urgent by it. To encounter this exhibition is to witness an artist in bloom: shimmering, resilient, unapologetic.