Artist Database

Vanessa Majoro is a retired telecommunications engineer and a self-taught abstract artist. Working primarily with recycled materials, she combines pointillism and threaded nylon on paper to create intricate, textural contemporary drawings. Her practice is rooted in meditative processes, including the unweaving of nylon bags traditionally used to sell oranges - an act that reflects her commitment to sustainability and transformation.

Majoro draws inspiration from her immediate environment, translating everyday materials into layered visual narratives. Her work has been featured in various platforms, including a commission with the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios, and group exhibitions with the Turbine Art Fair, and Sasol New Signatures. She is currently based in her hometown of Qwaqwa, South Africa, and is pursuing a BA in Visual and Multimedia Art.

Would you agree that the evening sky is misleading? How does it deceive us that stars are mapped in the same place each night? How are light years reduced to brief moments of observation? How does it play with perception, reducing celestial forms of magnitude - suns, moons, planets, constellations - to trails and clusters of tiny dots? Evenings spent in areas with minimal light pollution allow a subtle, silent conversation with these celestial forms. Telling tales about their formations.

The conversations continue in the studio, where blank sheets of paper are interpreted as the clear evening sky, void of stars and suns, awaiting their formation. Through the playful practice of pointillism and unweaving nylon bags traditionally used for trading oranges, I have found an avenue to an unexpected meditative process, approaching each work without preconceptions of what the end product should look like. The philosophies of late South Korean abstract artist Park Seo-Bo, provide comfort for the tedious labour, his belief in the level of purity that an artist attains as a consequence of countless repetition.

The process prompts questions relating to the metamorphosis that exists in the lifespan of the materials and all matter in existence. The nylon fabric takes on a new identity: a thread used for paper embroidery, resulting in the formulation of fictional theories about the formation of suns and celestial beings.