Ute Swanepoel

I use painting and drawing as tools for telling stories, and I use my story-like images to find a way to create a connection between the viewer’s own inner narratives and to the current environmental issues that are looming over our very existence.

It is my stance that humans share a universal language of wonder, humour and curiosity. By allowing myself to engage with this part of myself when I play with art materials, I reach for the wonder in other people. My work becomes a type of spiritual activism in that it draws on attitudes that connects us at our core, rather than focusing on cerebral narratives of power and elitism.

I use vestiges of already-existing mythology to allow the familiar stories to guide the more unfamiliar ideas closer into the viewer’s frame of acceptance and embrace. My aim as an artist is to absolutely insist on the relationship we have with nature as alive and I argue for the symbiotic necessity of relationships between non-human and non-human. My artwork is a testament to my clumsy inward fumbling of getting to know my humanness as much part of nature as what any other creature is.

With each of my artworks sold, a donation from the selling price is made to an environmental cause, such as Frien...

Baccalaureus Technologiae: Fine & Applied Art, Tshwane University of Technology, 2004

Galleries, South Africa:
Art Lovers
Trent Gallery