Meet the collective

Adele van Heerden (b. 1989) is a Cape Town-based painter whose work explores the relationship between place, light, reflection, and water. Working primarily with pencil and gouache on drafting film, and oil and gouache on linen, she draws inspiration from urban and natural landscapes, interior spaces, and waterscapes. Recent work focuses on the interplay between water and light, informed by her experience as a swimmer and a period of rehabilitation following hip surgery. Through careful observation, Van Heerden uses water as both subject and metaphor, exploring themes of perception, memory, and embodied experience. She holds qualifications in Fine Art, History, Politics and Art History, and Curatorship. Van Heerden has presented numerous solo exhibitions, including Alluvial (2026), Signal (2025), Mirror (2024), and Oceanic (2023), and has exhibited at major South African art fairs. Her work is represented in notable public and private collections, including FirstRand Bank, Artbank South Africa, and SANAVA.e finds herself in. After graduating from the Ruth Prowse School of Art in 2010, she went on to obtain a BA in History and Politics (UNISA) and an Honours Degree in Curatorship from UCT in 2015.

Aimee Lindeque was born and raised on a farm in Mpumalanga, South Africa. After matriculating in 2013, she moved to Cape Town to study Fine Art at Michaelis UCT, majoring in Sculpture and Art History. Aimee creates intricate watercolour and acrylic paintings, ink drawings, murals and illustrations. She playfully describes her work as "Hieronymus Bosch meets Where's Wally."

Painter and printmaker Aviwe Plaatje uses portraiture to explore the world around him. Working primarily with oil painting and the relief printing technique of linocut, he renders people from his community. His intricate, multi-layered linocuts use the medium's propensity towards texture to create uniquely expressive portraits. "In my artwork I document scenes I come across in day-to-day life. My inspiration comes from the world around me, I love absorbing my surroundings. I simply comment on life."

Claude Chandler is a Cape Town-based artist with a N.Diploma in Fine Arts who works out of SideTrack Studios, which he also manages. His work consists of large abstract portraits created using his unique 'stamp' technique. Chandler has participated in numerous art fairs, both locally and abroad, and is inspired by digital technologies and the ways in which we perceive the world through screens and lenses.

Concerned with issues such as overpopulation and fast-growing cities, Elske probes the loss and search for the human soul in the urbanized world. She responds through 2D mixed media paintings, drawings, etchings, 3D sculptures and animated media. Beginning 2022, ants started to populate her work — symbolising human-urban communities and exposing our tendency towards individualism as opposed to the common good.

Born in 1971 in Cape Town's Bo-Kaap, Fadiel Hermans paints from memory, drawing on the people, places and stories of his childhood. Working primarily in oils and spray paint, his bold, narrative style blends street art, pop art and graphic design with satirical undertones, inviting multiple readings of each piece. Self-taught and driven by a lifelong passion for painting, his work has been selected for limited-edition Diasec© prints and a 2025 artist residency in Leipzig, Germany. He is represented in Cape Town by The Artist Gallery.

Frances White is a contemporary artist and designer living in Cape Town. Born in KwaZulu Natal and raised in Johannesburg, Frances majored in English literature, history of art and painting at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT. She plays with the boundary between art and design, drawing on influences of Pop Art, pattern, fabric and surface design. Her work in enamel, glitter, reflective and holographic vinyls tries to capture her fascination with light.

James Labuschagne explores human subjectivity through portraiture and employs a thoroughly studied and technically rigorous approach to painting and drawing. His work grapples with how our visual experience grows increasingly distorted and deranged in a digitised and alienated world, working with traditional methods that position themselves at odds with a culture obsessed with efficiency and relentless acceleration. He has taught and exhibited internationally.

Joanna paints landscapes and portraits to hold onto a moment in time, to feel present, to celebrate being alive, and to connect each of us to what is deep within us. She paints en plein air and from life, with an expressive, bold, quick style. She recently returned to Cape Town after studying for three years at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy, having previously lived and worked in New York, London and Singapore.

Karen Wykerd is a Cape Town-based artist who works across a range of media. Using embroidery and painting on canvas, paper or glass, she combines dissolution with detail to express her ongoing fascination with everyday city life. Her endless search for light takes her down busy streets, forest paths and high above the city — captured first in photography and then in pigment or thread.

Kate (b. 1993, Pietermaritzburg) is a Cape Town-based visual artist. She received a Bachelor's degree in Fine Art from the University of Stellenbosch in 2018 and a Master's degree in Visual Art from the same institution in 2021. Known for her organic, plant-inspired paintings and drawings, her 'foliagescapes' reflect her fascination with botanical art while functioning as an expression of the uplifting, calming qualities inherent within nature.

Lauren Ratcliffe is a Cape Town-based contemporary artist whose work explores the spaces we inhabit and the emotions they hold. Working in a playful conversation between acrylics and oils, Lauren builds her canvases with layers of texture, pattern, and bold colour. Her paintings centre on the idea of "spaces" — rooms, corners, objects, and arrangements that hold meaning far beyond their physical form.

As an artist, Leandri is constantly exploring new ways to depict that which she believes in and connects with in the most honest way possible. She trusts that the viewer will experience something when looking at work that was created with passion, but also with context that is personal to the artist. This is the power of art.

Marli Steyl is a Fine Artist working mainly in oils and alcohol ink. Her point of origin is her place as a young, white, Afrikaans-speaking female in post-colonial, post-Apartheid South Africa. Family photographs are the source material for many of her paintings — snapshots of joyous experiences from the 1930s to the early 1990s that she returns to with difficulty, using her art to explore the past and present.

Selvin November (b. 1969) was born in, and still lives and works in Cape Town. He completed a Diploma in Art and Design at Cape Technikon and was awarded a three-month residency on Robben Island in 1996. His latest solo exhibitions include The Portrait Speaks at the AVA Gallery in Cape Town (2008) and Young, Free and Single as the Festival Artist at the University of Stellenbosch Woordfees (2019).

Tanja Truscott's artwork is born from a fascination with painterly abstraction and the power it has to engage us visually and emotionally. She works intuitively and is inspired by sounds and sensations from the outdoors, or by literature, poetry and music. Born in the Netherlands and now living in Cape Town, Truscott received a BA in Graphic Design from the University of Stellenbosch in 1984 and turned to painting full time in 2015.