- Visual artist Boemo Diale won an R80 000 prize at the Cape Town Art Fair.
- Hailing from Mafikeng, Boemo uses her talent to bring light to topics of spirituality, femininity and queer identity.
- She plans on travelling internationally and collaborating with other artists.
Visual artist Boemo Diale won the Tomorrow/Today Prize for emerging and underrepresented artists at the 2024 Investec Cape Town Art Fair.
Boemo, who began creating art at a young age, decided to use her talent and creativity to explore queer identity, femininity and spirituality. She says she fell in love with visual art when she was still in school where she explored her talents with subjects such as creative arts.
The emerging artist then developed an interest in using and exploring the Black body as a source of inspiration for her art. Travelling between the cities of Johannesburg and Mafikeng, she got to experience different aspects of life and this sparked many ideas and concepts.
Boemo intends to continue to collaborate, with plans to travel more and work with more international artists. “I really do intend to try and go somewhere and travel and see something that I think might aid in my visual language and storytelling,” she stated.
Apart from globetrotting, creating artefacts using ceramics is something upcoming artist is currently exploring. She is intrigued by how a vision can come to life in clay and water and she would love to see more of her artwork in ceramic form. Her first batch of ceramic artefacts were used at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair and she looks forward to creating more.
“I really enjoyed working with the materials. At the moment that is something I want to focus on.”
Her current body of work, Going Home, left an international jury impressed resulting in her being awarded the R80 000 prize. Boemo says she was shocked at first when she received the prize. However, she believes that these are the results of the hard work that she has been putting in and she is grateful to have received this prize as she contested with other amazing artists from 12 different galleries.
With the prize money, Boemo intends to ensure that the rental for her studio is paid and that she has more than enough materials to continue creating and exploring her craft. She says, “My intentions with the prize money is definitely to pull back into my studio, to buy more materials, pay my studio.
“I think it’s such a relief to be able to have a bit less pressure in terms of just maintaining my studio practice because that could be quite stressful from month to month.”
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She adds that she is filled with joy as she witnesses more Black artists receiving spaces to showcase their work and says for artists to receive more recognition, they should use social media effectively. They should treat it as a “live CV” where their work is portrayed and easily accessible.
She says that collaboration is something that has helped her and she encourages artists to collaborate more.Apart from ceramics Boemo would like to integrate more digital media elements into her work such as sound design, video elements and photographical references.
“I think I still have a lot of playing to do and I intend to do. I’m very excited to see how that affects my work going forward.”
