Panashe Mafoti

My practice is rooted in the body—its histories, its inheritances, and its quiet rebellions. As a multidisciplinary artist working across wearable sculpture, textiles, performance, and installation, I explore how identity is carried, concealed, and transformed through material. I work with fiber, found objects, and old garments to create forms that function both as protective skins and as mythic extensions of the self. My work is an ongoing negotiation between the interior world and the social gaze: how we are seen, how we survive, and how we return to ourselves. Raised in a lineage shaped by spirituality, discipline, and silence, my work often emerges from the tension between expectation and authenticity. I investigate how my African Zimbabwean narrative is embodied —become archives of generational labor, memory, and emotional inheritance. Textiles allow me to honor these histories while bending them into new language. Every invention becomes a way of speaking what was once unsaid. At its core, my work reflects my desire to understand people deeply and to express creativity. I create to make emotional intelligence visible—mapping the ways we attach, interpret, and respond to one another. This sensitivity is not only personal; it is a method. I treat material the same way I treat people: with closeness, attention, and the belief that transformation happens when something is truly witnessed. My approach is deeply influenced by my neurodivergence, which shapes my process into an embodied, intuitive rhythm. ADHD becomes a form of movement—a way of thinking in multiplicities, of following emotional threads across mediums, and of building work that breathes with the nonlinear truth of lived experience. Through this, I create spaces where fragmentation is not a flaw but a route back to wholeness. I am drawn to presenting work within Black institutions because my practice is fundamentally about the complexity, resilience, and futurity of Black life. My pieces honor personal narrative while reimagining them for contemporary narratives. They live between the mental and the material, the intimate and the communal—asking how we hold ourselves and each other through change. My work is a commitment to emotional clarity, cultural memory, and the making of new skins we can choose for ourselves. It is a continuous act of becoming.