Description
BIOGRAPHY OF BULUMKO MBETE
Bulumko Mbete is an artist from Pretoria with a multi-cultural heritage. Her interests include archival strategies, pedagogy and reflecting on the personal as a lens to magnify social structures and functions. She is a recent graduate of the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art. Materiality forms the conceptual lens with which she likes to articulate her work by way of using textile, beading, and weaving.
Bulumko Mbete’s artistic practice explores the ways in which textiles relate to an individual’s embodied knowledge and sense of place. Featuring domestic and utilitarian materials such as wool, plastic, cotton, blankets, and beads, Mbete’s artworks experiment with alternating and challenging our experience of their materiality. She makes use of materials that speak to the idea or the feeling of ‘home’- those that can symbolise the complexities of family dynamics whilst portraying notions of love, protection, and support. Through the exploration of familiar and familial materials, she finds a language to speak to the woven connectivity of relationships and experiences.
