Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi – respectfully known as MaSebidi – speaks of language as a form of care in which words carry responsibility: to community, to the earth, and to the spiritual presence in the everyday. Across her practice, MaSebidi returns to the imperative to search beyond what is immediately legible. Her works may be understood as invitations into a more layered way of seeing, where ancestral presence, lived experience and communal responsibility converge.
With Ntlo E Etsamayang/The Walking House (1990-1991), a series of pastel-on-paper collages, MaSebidi builds on her grandmother’s directive that MaSebidi be a “walking house”, carrying shelter, memory, and ethical capacity while moving into the world. The works’ saturated colour, compressed space and interlaced bodies generate a visual field where human, animal and ancestral registers co-exist. The Sebidi family spirit animal, the fish, enters as a guide across thresholds, a reminder that water holds histories and circulates connections. The ever present figurative form arrives through distortion, collage and abstraction, shaped by a commitment to see beyond the surface of things.
In the Giardino delle Vergini the bronze trilogy Women in Conversation I–III (2024), extends MaSebidi’s commitment to matrilineal knowledge. The three women hold distinct postures, gestures and emotional registers; together they produce a charged choreography of speaking, listening, withholding and witnessing.
—Greer Valley
