Dineo Ponde Mafora

Dineo Ponde (b. 2001) is a visual artist. She graduated from Stellenbosch University in 2023 with a degree in Visual Arts, specializing in Fine Arts. She is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand.

For Ponde, drawing serves as an affective and embodied practice that becomes a site of knowledge production. She utilizes materials such as inks, threads, and fabrics as a form of storytelling. The act of sewing becomes a way to situate her practice within her matrilineage. Visually, black thread works to juxtapose the liquidity of ink. The creature she creates serves as a response to affective and embodied encounters that exist historically, generationally, and socially. Drawing serves as a moment of contact, proximity, resistance and conjuring. It is a call to come closer.