I Seek Your Softness brings together four emerging South African artists whose practices explore intimacy, emotional texture, and the quiet force of care. Working across painting, printmaking, drawing, and text, their approaches are materially grounded and conceptually attuned to vulnerability.
Joëlle Joubert (b. 2000) layers painting, drawing, and found imagery to explore veiling, sentiment, and the shifting boundaries between public and private life. Her work is shaped by processes of concealment and accumulation.
Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne (b. 1994) moves between painting, writing, and object-making. Her recent work reflects on memory and emotion, often drawing on personal ritual and the unstable narratives of the everyday.
Kay-Leigh Fisher (b. 1998) works primarily in monotype printmaking. Through texture, layered colour, and absence, her work evokes emotional atmospheres tied to belonging, care, and the complexities of domestic space.
Dineo Ponde (b. 2001) works in an expanded field of drawing, incorporating fabric, thread, and ink to reflect on memory, time, and home. Their practice embraces ambiguity, using material storytelling to hold personal and collective histories in tension.
Together, these artists offer a shared language of softness, foregrounding slowness, feeling, and relation as formal and political gestures.