‘SITI’ Salon Exhibit
SITI — This Is Us
A joint exhibition by Art by Zonke and ill daisy
SITI, meaning “ThIS IS US” in isiXhosa, is not merely a title. It is a declaration. It is an arrival. It is a remembering.
This work stands for the human form as origin and witness — the body as archive, altar, and instrument. The figure is our primary language. Through it, we speak of what we carry in our skin and what we pass through our hands.
Art By Zonke :
I place the human subject within domestic spaces — the home and the street as an extension of the home — because the ordinary is sacred. Within this architectural fabric, spirituality and tradition are not distant rituals; they breathe through gestures, postures, and quiet exchanges. The home becomes a site of ceremony. The everyday becomes a monument.
Colour is my assertion. Bold, unapologetic hues confront and converse with monochromatic illustrations. Saturation and silence coexist. Vibrancy interrupts stillness. This tension reflects the dualities we inhabit — joy and grief, memory and visibility.
ill daisy :
My process embraces multiplicity. I layer photography with childlike line drawings and wax crayon marks, dissolving the boundary between sophistication and innocence. Through mixed media, I pursue abstraction that feels like memory: fragmented, textured, tender. Nostalgia is not sentimentality here — it is a method of excavation. I return to the language of childhood to unearth truths that adulthood conceals.
Ceramic sculptures extend this exploration into form. The body becomes dimensional, weight-bearing, fragile yet enduring. Alongside the human figure stand the tools of the everyday — vessels, objects shaped by touch and repetition. These forms honour labour, ritual, and continuity. Clay, like flesh, remembers pressure. It records the hand.
SITI is an offering.
It is about lineage and becoming.
It is about colour as resistance, memory as material, and the domestic as sacred ground.