The dreamer stands on a hill overlooking a vast expanse of water. She sees long hair the colour of rope. Treasures emerging from sand. She sees maps of places that do not belong to the known world and people riding animals that left this planet long ago. In dreams, time collapses. Space destabilises. In dreams, the dreamer communes with fantasy, memory, ancestry, imagination. When she awakens, she tries to weave the fragments into a narrative thread. But as the images fade, as the vividness dulls and the obligations of the day begin to crowd the mind, the thread frays and, more often than not, is summarily forgotten.

Simphiwe Buthelezi, on the other hand, wants to linger in dreams. Their landscapes. Their messages. But most importantly, their nebulousness. How might an artist translate the immaterial into material? How might she capture its textures, colours and intimations in a way that honours its vagueness? These are the questions that Buthelezi asks in Scenes in Dreams, her second solo exhibition following Imvuselelo Yenkululeko, which debuted in 2020.

Amanzi Abomvu - Red Waters for example, was inspired by a dream of a blood-red stream. Buthelezi has, accordingly, draped a blood-red satin cloth across a board and treated it with a fixative to make it look wet. Around the edges of the cloth, she has scattered beach sand. Using resin, she has encrusted handfuls of stones, crystals and beads. The tactility of the materials creates a visceral effect. It is as if one could reach out and touch the wetness of the cloth, or let the beads and the sand course through one’s fingers. The spiritual connotations of Buthelezi’s chosen material lend another layer of potency to the work. These shells, stones and beads have been used by generations of diviners and healers across Southern Africa.

Making use of both tankrali seed and glass beads, the artist also acknowledges these objects’ long and poignant histories. The former were used across the region for thousands of years as an integral element to the sophisticated arts of dress and adornment, while the latter first made their way to Southern Africa across the Indian Ocean to the coast of East Africa, and then inland to Great Zimbabwe, between the seventh and tenth centuries. To put this in perspective, European glass beads were not introduced until the arrival of Portuguese and Dutch traders, nearly one thousand years later. When Buthelezi uses beads in her compositions, she is paying tribute to the ancestral knowledge they carry as well as the artistry of the master beadworkers whose names have been largely neglected by the Western-dominated canon of art history.

The exhibition also includes several works fashioned from the grass mats for which the artist has become known. These, too, are historically-charged materials. Called amacansi in isiZulu, grass mats have been used for a variety of purposes, from the mundane (as a place to sit or sleep) to the ceremonial (as a central feature of any wedding or funeral) to the divine (as a divination tool used by izangoma), and the art of weaving the mats has been passed down intergenerationally, namely by women in the family. When Buthelezi makes use of the mats in her practice, she brings these generations of weavers, sitters, brides, grievers, healers and dreamers into communion with one another. “I am calling from the past to understand now to chart a course for the future,” she says. By coiling and cutting the mats, as well as binding them together to produce abstract, somewhat otherworldly forms, Buthelezi takes a material that is important to her heritage and reworks it for a contemporary audience.

“Wherever the reed is,” Buthelezi told me, “I’m home.” Interestingly, however, as she and her work have travelled – namely, to present Izinyathelo zabagcotshiweyo (Footsteps of the Ordained) at Paris+ – she has been struck by how viewers from all over the world recognise amacansi, though by other names, from their own homes: Brazil, Singapore, Nigeria. This goes to show the heartbreak and the hope of these shared art- and craft-making practices. Heartbreak, because of the histories of slavery that these objects’ migratory patterns trace. Hope, because of the solidarities they engender and the respect for the cyclical nature of the earth they apprise. amaCansi, after all, are gifts from the earth, ultimately, these long grass reeds that were given birth by rain and sun. Being organic, they will return to the earth, ultimately, too. It is this biodegradability that makes it difficult to chart the history of icansi while, at the same time, suggests that the material may prove to be important as we learn to adapt to a climate-stressed future. That is, if society can learn to respect the indigenous knowledge systems from which it derives.

“Be flexible and do not break.” This is a sort of mantra that Buthelezi repeats to herself in the studio. The resulting presentation embodies this mantra, both literally – by using flexible materials such as cloth and icansi – and figuratively – by approaching abstraction, dreamscapes, embracing the unknown. Here is an artist who has proven her malleability, her ability to think and feel through the process, adapting to the challenges the work presents and reimagining it according to new visions.