Going Home with Boemo Diale – Reflections on 2024
Going Home with Boemo Diale – Reflections on 2024
Boemo Diale’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in the exploration of internal worlds, guided by a devotion to spirituality and personal histories. Inspired by hooks’ seminal work, ‘All about Love: New Visions,’ Diale’s works delve into the themes of completion and healing within a personalised framework shaped by the concepts of prayer and hope. This intuitive and reflective process prompts Diale to contemplate her relationship with self-love, self-worthiness, and worship.
"When I speak of the spiritual, I refer to the recognition within everyone that there is a place of mystery in our lives where forces that are beyond human desire ... I call these forces divine spirit.” – bell hooks
Going Home features a series of bright and bold unique works on paper, wood carved frames and ceramics. Diale is able to introduce representations from her personal family archive into the whimsical interior scenes, creating a type of push-and-pull between the artist’s reality and her envisaged world. These central compositions exist within a frame that signify various motifs within the artist’s thematics, often symbols of spirituality, femininity and freedom. The power of prayer through colourful expressions; the idea of a cyclic loop through generations - history and human experiences are not linear, but rather circular, with events and circumstances echoing themselves over time. Within this body of work, Boemo Diale captures the notion that certain patterns, behaviours, or characteristics tend to repeat or resurface across different generations.
Each image acts as self reflection with consideration to the past, present, and future, dreams and manifestations. Through vibrant hues and compositions, Diale aims to create visual narratives that evoke a sense of spirituality and transcendence by meddling in bizarre imagery, San rock art, African symbols of devotion and intuitive mark-making. The attention given to each visual element becomes a form of devotion – an act of reverence that captures the essence of prayer. Serving as a vessel to carry these prayers and meanings, the utilitarian pot is a motif rendered in warm and cool tones, combining metaphors to represent the interplay between introspection and connection. Colours are layered and intertwined, creating depth and movement, symbolising the fluidity of prayer as it weaves through our lives. Through these variations of metaphor in practice, Diale considers if it is possible to break the curses that play on a loop across generations. She suggests that prayer transcends religious boundaries – re-contextualising it as a way to navigate through universal longing for meaning. By using her practice as a mode of mimicking, Diale has created a form of personal devotion; an expression of vulnerability, hope, and gratitude and protection, bordered by prayer.
Palette and Patterns
Boemo Diale works with a bright palette and solid colour planes decorated with abstract patterns. Her consistent visual lexicon and mixed media use paints a perspicacious narrative reading of her interior world and its entanglement with quotidian realities. Visual patterning mimics thought patterns, the contortions of her figures, borders, and nudes captured in vases, all intimate the confines of the self in her mind, and her colourful palette holding her vivid dream-like imaginings.
Boemo Diale, Knocked Out, 2024, Mixed media on canvas
Vessels and Spirituality
Ceramic vessels have been created by humans since time immemorial. Every human society near a body of water that provided clay materials produced ceramic vessels, utilitarian, and ritual. Humans are inextricably entwined with clay bodies. Diale uses the clay forms as allegorical objects carrying and containing, a space to demonstrate the universality of spirituality and prayer, transcendent of time and the cultural constraints that attempt to define these deeply human experiences and practices.
Boemo Diale, A place to rest, 2024, Glazed Slip Ceramic
The Zambia Frame
The Zambia frames, carved in conversation with Boemo Diale by Rabson Bwalya, were hand made for each canvas from Kiaat wood. The Zambia frames are a nod to the Zanzibar frames so frequently used in the work of historical South African artist Irma Stern, whose work in the German Expressionist style speaks to Diale's own style of painting human figures. The frames newly situate the aesthetic within the contemporary moment.
Boemo Diale, Going mad and seeing things, 2024, Mixed media on canvas with hand-crafted Zambia fame
Prizewinning Booth – Going Home
Boemo Diale won the prestigious Tomorrows/Today prize in 2024 at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. A special booth was constructed to imitate the artist's 1980s home, with vinyl flooring, and special wall colours selected. Boemo's works interrogate the inner workings of her child-self that existed in liminal spaces between rural and urban. Her works reflect nuances of gender, race, culture, identity, mental health and spirituality.