Okuhle Gubuza

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

Red Earth

This body of work emerges from the intersection of phenomenology, indigenous epistemology, and the sensation that Romain Rolland describes as Oceanic. It is from this state of porous consciousness that my practice unfolds, guided by an awareness of matter as living, time as cyclical, and perception as a sacred act. The Oceanic becomes both method and metaphor; a way of knowing that refuses separation, that dissolves the boundaries between self and world, body and land, memory, and form. 

Through materials such as umbacho, imbola, thread, and ityali, I travel the contours of my Xhosa and Hlubi lineage. My approach stems from phenomenological thought to challenge Western notions of linearity and objectivity, instead situating the act of making as an embodied philosophy, one that acknowledges sensation, trance, and relation. The work thus unfolds as a series of maps, mirrors, and diagrams. They are structures of orientation within the vast field of the real and the imagined. Each piece is a site of correspondence between the physical and the spiritual, between the memory of land and the embodied act of creation. Within these moments, I seek to articulate a world in which perception is participatory, time is recursive, and being is always in motion, returning to the Oceanic whole from which it first emerged. 

Ultimately, these works insist on the simultaneity of worlds and the fluidity of temporal experience. They reject the rigidity of Western chronologies, affirming time as cyclical, recursive, and alive. In their becoming, they enact a return, a continuous unfolding of spirit into form, of memory into presence, and of self into the vast, Oceanic whole.