Corlie de Kock is a South African artist whose mysterious and striking dark charcoal portraits have found a home in collections in both South Africa and abroad. She views art as a visual language – a form of communication between the viewer and the artwork. For de Kock, the process of creating an artwork is just as important as the final product, for the meaning is produced through experiencing various ideas and emotions as she changes and adds details to the picture along the way. Currently, she is very much interested in visual images as stories and how these stories are interpreted by the viewer, how the psychological state of the viewer impacts their interpretation of the artwork. The child residing within us all and the “becoming child” is an important theme in her work as well as space and landscape, which is interpreted within cultural rather than natural contexts.

Blessing Ngobeni, an award winning thirty-four-year-old South African artist, is one of the country’s most exciting contemporary artists and who is receiving growing international attention. Ngobeni works primarily in mixed media, including paint and collage on canvas, to convey strong and challenging messages regarding the abuse of power, political consequences and socio-economic as well as environmental issues.