Justine Mahoney
Justine Mahoney is a Cape Town-based sculptor working in bronze whose hybrid figures present an alternative mythology for our times. Born in Johannesburg in 1971, her work is deeply informed by the dissonant realities and social fractures of growing up under Apartheid.
Rupture and transformation are major thematic concerns for Mahoney, in both her exploration of identity and her “hack-and-bash” approach of visual juxtaposition. Although her figures emanate from her own imagination, they begin as visual citations from popular and alternative culture and from art history. Children’s toys, graphic novels, ’80s magazines and music, erotica, Instagram photographs, science fiction films, Neo Classical art and traditional African sculpture all feed into the work she creates. A voracious collector of printed ephemera and digital imagery, she begins her process by making photo collages that stitch together these contrasting worlds.
Submitted by Southern Guild
