A Small Kind of Magic

A Small Kind of Magic brings together three artists whose work returns to early experience, memory, and the ways identity is shaped over time. Across painting, sculpture and printmaking, the exhibition moves through spaces where meaning is not fixed, and where feeling often comes before language.

Rosemary Marriott draws on childhood stories and the act of storytelling itself. Her paintings place figures within shifting, uncertain spaces shaped by fairy tales and remembered moments, reflecting on how stories are formed, shared, and transformed over time. Her cloth sculptures extend this language into material form, carrying a strong sense of hand, home and memory. Constructed from calico, cotton, animal skin and sawdust, they hold traces of care, history and lived experience.

Moloko Mabotja’s practice explores a search for authenticity through the removal of what obscures it — inherited expectations, shame, and imposed identities. Working with soft pastel and colour reduction printmaking, he builds and removes layers to reveal what remains beneath. Shaped by his personal relationship with language and early experiences with literacy, his work turns to visual expression as a space where meaning exists beyond words. Themes of loss, grief and transformation run through his process, using material as a way of navigating vulnerability and reclaiming a sense of self.

Jenny Nijenhuis examines how identity is shaped through social conditioning, particularly in relation to gender and conformity. In Be a Man, she reflects on how early expectations placed on boys — to suppress emotion, reject vulnerability and perform strength — can reinforce cycles of violence and narrow ideas of masculinity. In Sheeple Hatchling, she extends this enquiry to broader systems of conformity, considering how collective behaviour and structures of control shape individual thought and action. Her work questions what it means to belong, to follow, and to think independently within systems that reward obedience.

Across the exhibition, there is a shared return to early beginnings, where identity is still forming and understanding remains incomplete. The works hold a tension between softness and discomfort, familiarity and uncertainty. Together, they open a space to reflect on how we come to know ourselves — shaped not only by what we are taught, but also by what we carry, question, and begin to unlearn over time.

Media enquiries:
Reneilwe Mathibe
reneilwe@lizamore.co.za