In the Studio With Boemo Diale

On Mythology, Domestic Space, and Making a New World

Boemo Diale is a Johannesburg-based multi-disciplinary artist, born in 2000, whose route into painting came sideways - through a Film and Television degree at Wits University and a 2022 internship at David Krut Workshop, taken to see how print might feed her practice. It did. She's continued working with the workshop's printers since, most recently alongside Kim-Lee Loggenberg-Tim on a series of etchings and monotypes. At Open City, she was on watercolour plates prepared specifically to hold her mark - thin layers of gum arabic laid down so that when she painted, the colour would stay fluid rather than pull back into itself, true to the way she actually puts pigment down.

Diale spoke about her own practice as rooted in cosmology and mythology, and in dissecting her own maternal histories and cultural references. For this particular project, she'd written a story - one she'd originally wanted to work like a children's book - moving through ideas of time, cycles, and passage. The narrative itself came through in fragments too broken by the recording to quote cleanly, but the intent behind it was clear in how she described her own process: using imagery, and her own cosmology, as a way to hold and express the passing of time.

Much of what she paints, she said, comes directly from memory - childhood moments, something her mother was doing, a memory of an aunt, a cousin, a sister, or her grandmother sitting on the couch. She described a pull toward domestic space specifically - "I think that's where black women are most safe," she said - and toward reimagining it as a kind of world-building, inventing "alternate realities where things are like... painted, like a purple old room I never had, but imagined and wished for." For her, remaking the domestic isn't nostalgia so much as invention: a way of building a world she wanted to exist rather than only recording the one she grew up in.

Colour, for Diale, does specific work against the weight of what she's actually painting. She described her subject matter as heavy - a reference to her childhood, and to watching the women in her family move through difficult, different experiences - and her use of bright, playful colour as a deliberate counterbalance. "Painting kind of takes away from the seriousness of such a conversation, which I enjoy," she said, tracing that instinct back to childhood, when humour became a way to "externalise things." She also spoke about limiting her own palette at times, a constraint she chooses rather than one imposed on her.

Her training was largely self-directed, and she was candid about what that cost and gave her. She described struggling, early on, with the archival side of the work - "how long things last, like using your right materials" - something she says art school would have taught her sooner, and that she had to learn through trial and error instead. But she was equally clear that staying outside that system had an upside: she watched friends at art school "grappling with what they were told to versus what they want to do" in a way she was largely spared, even as other pressures around skill and capability took their place. She keeps a folder of reference images from artists she admires, and when nothing exists that matches what she's trying to make, she said, she'll invent her own symbol to draw from instead.

Diale returned more than once to the idea of symbol and manifestation - the concept of a star recurring as something she thinks about through cosmology, literature, and poetry, standing in for a relationship between past, future, and the present she’s actively making. Asked how she arrives at titles, she talked her way there out loud - “I’ll look at the star, and I’m like, star, star… talking star” - before landing on this piece’s name. Asked separately what her own name means, she said simply: “status.” Someone in the room offered a reading of that back to her - “status of the present… a god’s peace, your status is present” - which she accepted as fitting.

She spoke warmly about the panel format some of the work took that day, calling it "film-esque" - a nod, perhaps, to where she started. "Those borders are folded with... bizarre imagery of dreams and manifestations," she said, "a fun way to hold onto images and create a story." Each frame, she said, works as its own doorway: "they all exist together, but they also exist as their own kind of entities that could lead to other worlds."

On the question of whether art was ever taken seriously as a path in her own life, Diale was matter-of-fact. Her family's early scepticism - "no, no, no" - has shifted, she said, now that they understand it "as a concept, as a career," and see her building something sustained rather than casual. She's since started thinking about a Master's degree, saying she feels "ready for more serious, like, academic approach to art making."