Justine Mahoney

Justine Mahoney is a Cape Town-based sculptor working in bronze and ceramic whose hybrid figures present an alternative mythology for our times. She is primarily concerned with the formation of identity and the rupture and transformation that shapes this process.

Born in Johannesburg in 1971, Mahoney completed her National Diploma in Fine Art at the Technikon of Witwatersrand in 1991.

Although her figures emanate from her own imagination, they often begin as amalgamations of multiple elements spanning historical eras, knowledge systems, visual traditions and types of media. A voracious collector of printed ephemera and digital imagery, she cites freely from popular culture, alternative media and art history. Children’s toys, graphic novels, ’80s music magazines, erotica, Instagram imagery, science fiction films, Neo Classical art and traditional African sculpture all feed into the work she creates. Collage becomes an evocation of hybridity, a stitching together of dissonant and complementary realities to make a more meaningful whole.

Mahoney approaches each body of work as a progression. Her fascination with fantasy, child’s play and imagination, underscored by a sense of unease, make up the overarching theme of her earlier work. Her first collection, Innocence (2014), dealt with the playfulness and terrors of childhood in a series of doll-like but strangely anonymous figures. Her second series, Tainted (2016) – her first major solo exhibition at Southern Guild – traversed themes of identity related to early adolescence. The jostling schizophrenia at the heart of Mahoney’s work rises to the surface in this group of 10 figures, referred to by the artist as “an army of toy soldiers”.

Mage (2020) enters more ambiguous territory, delving into the tangled web of transformation from adolescence to adulthood. Many of these figures are transgressive, tracing the dialectical forces that the artist witnessed in her own children, but which she sees in all of us – power and vulnerability, desire and self-protection, broken-ness and healing.

Southern Guild has exhibited her work at international design fairs such as Design Miami, Design Miami/Basel and The Salon Art and Design in New York. Mahoney’s latest solo exhibition with Southern Guild, VIGIL, opened in February 2024.