Young and vital artist: Matty Monethi

Johannesburg-based visual artist Matty Monethi was born in 1996 in Maseru, Lesotho, and grew up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. After completing her Diploma in Fine Art from the Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town, she went on to specialise in printmaking at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. Monethi then completed a BA in Fine Arts at the Wits School of Arts. 

The artist uses the mediums of painting, printmaking and text to expand on her evolving concept of self, relationships of power, belonging, and repositories of memory. Her works explore her experiences in academia and her adopted countries through the themes of archival curation, migration and memory in deeply personal dimensions.

Monethi has participated in multiple group exhibitions, such as at the Julie Miller Art Institute, Bag Factory Artist Studios, Gallery MOMO, The Joyce Gordon Gallery, Forms Gallery and the David Krut Gallery, to name a few.

Why do you explore memories, what memories do you explore?

I started exploring memories because I wanted to make sense of my place in life, in the world and in my family. I was interested in the passage of time and how it affects me, my close relationships and the spaces that we inhabit. I am interested in how it affects the way I remember moments and people. I've always found it very difficult to think about the future, and the present is just uncertain, I never know what’s going on. [As such] I appreciate the past, it’s mostly concrete. It [is] a good place for me to draw from artistically. I could look at pictures and videos and be sure that something happened.

I primarily work with photographs from my family albums and photographs that either I or my friends have taken. A lot of these are my lived experiences, while others are moments before my time. It’s strange to look at an image of yourself and have little to no recollection of that moment or be uncertain of whether what you remember is true. That uncertainty is exciting to work with.

What informs your work?

My work is informed by my own life experiences in relation to the people close to me and the spaces I/we occupy. I have moved around a lot; my work focuses on memories formed while I lived in those different environments.  I recount these memories through paint and text. My artistic practice is [concerned with] revisiting these chapters in my life, recalling, reconstructing, and retelling experiences. It’s a nostalgic process.

When I am creating, I am remembering and when I am remembering I am creating. My process often starts with a photograph/memory, then comes the writing and sketching, and then the painting. Other times it starts with an idea/thought/feeling, I then think back to a time in my life that best represents that idea and select images from that time to work from. In this process there are details I am confident in, there are blank spaces, falsehoods and imaginations that come with memory because it’s always shifting. I paint with the intention of presenting these findings. In my work, there is space for fact and fiction, for presences and absences.

Please tell us about your upcoming work, exhibitions, projects, and plans for the future?

I am currently working on a series of smaller works on paper using gouache and watercolour. These are non-figurative works of interior and exterior spaces I’ve occupied for any length of time. I’m also working on a painting for an upcoming group show here in Lesotho; it is the beginning of a larger long-term project with multiple organisations [t]here.

For the next two years, I will be working with them within the realm of arts, culture, and heritage to commemorate the bicentenary existence of the Basotho Nation. In mid-October I’ll be showing work at StART Art Fair London at Saatchi Gallery, as part of a focus section highlighting the work of three emerging artists from Southern Africa.

I’m just going to keep on working, making art, exploring, experimenting, and exhibiting. I’d love to collaborate more with other artists, that’s something I’m working towards.