Born in Limpopo in 1991, Mashilo’s multidimensional practice encompasses mixed-media painting, drawing, and collage, and sees her addressing themes of spiritual identity, memory, ancestry, community and belonging.

Drawing on inspiration from photographic archives, she builds expansive scenes in which imagined representatives of Blackness migrate through abstract liminal spaces. These scenes act as celestial cartographies, connecting the depicted Black figures through a felt mutuality of heritage, spirituality, shared ritual and intent. These migratory figures, forever moving between and through, are driven by an energetic pull toward a new vanguard where purpose and representation can be renegotiated.

Mashilo’s figures are drawn from family photographs, historical imagery depicting various experiences of Black lives, and portraits of people from her own community. In this way, she enmeshes the contemporary and historical as a form of interdimensional mapping. Lineage and memory, both collective and personalised, conflate in this unknown world. Her vast cosmological landscapes offer a multiverse of imagined futures, weaving together place and space, charting a rich and diverse tradition of African spirituality and identity.

Notable group exhibitions include SCENORAMA, curated by Gabi Ngcobo at the Javett Centre in Pretoria (2022); SMO Contemporary’s group presentation at ArtXLagos in Lagos, Nigeria (2021); 40 under 40 at KRONE X WHATIFTHEWORLD in Tulbagh (2021); The Medium is the Message, curated by Azu Nwagbogu at Unit London in London, UK (2020); and Liminality in Infinite Space at the African Artists Foundation in Lagos (2020).

Solo presentations include There are other worlds they have not told you of at 99 Loop Gallery in Cape Town, and The Possibility of a Journey, curated by Tammy Langtry as part of the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, South Africa, both in 2020. Mashilo’s work forms part of the Shulting Art Collection, Tiroche Deleon Collection, and The Suzie Wong Collection as well as private collections in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Korea and United States of America.