Dedicated to the act of cherishing lineage, Manyaku Mashilo creates otherworldly re-imaginings with precise linework. In her drawings, Mashilo develops her ongoing exploration of her own form of cartographic portraits. Her iconic portraits capture the self, representing a black, queer community cloaked, clothed and bathed in celestial cartographies. The enmeshed figures perform a multiplication of mappings piecing together dimensions of time, place and space, offering the land and the body as the source of a complex question of spiritual identity.

Cloaked in their own ancestral time, each individual is framed by the architecture of rooms, windows and arches as portals or paths which challenge the logic of space to depict spiritual existence within other worlds.

‘Kgoro ya mathomo’ translates to ‘The first gate’.
(Excerpt of text written by Tammy Langtry)