Talia Ramkilawan
AVA Exhibition: As Natural As Daylight: Plants, Memory & The Edge of Belonging (Group Show) 20.11.25 - 24.01.26
Talia Ramkilawan is an artist and teacher living and working in Cape Town, South Africa. Ramkilawan’s work aims to address her own lived experience with South African Indian identity and culture. She uses wool to visualize the complexity of one’s relationship to her and her world. Talia’s work serves as a personal exercise in both reckoning and healing; needling through her relationships with self, family, friends, lovers, queerness, South African Indian-ness, indenture, and a chain of social and historical complexities that follows.
Central to Talia Ramkilawan’s practice is rug hooking, a slow, accumulative process with which she creates her “tapestry adjacent” wall pieces. Her more recent preoccupations include pleasure, intimacy, vulnerability, and softness as expressed in everyday life. Transformation does not require that we suffer or torture ourselves. It can happen in quiet moments of peace and stillness, too.
Each piece of wool and fabric is meticulously pulled through by hand and a crochet needle, leaving behind blisters. Her battle wounds are reflections of the work put in. The repetition is hard and allows a trance-like state of introspection.
Her work captures shameless acts of love, articulating the artistic reflections of erotica and tenderness that are entrenched in the mandate that is to be brown, queer and radical, and how we navigate pleasure. The playfulness of colour and texture powerfully collaborates to provoke this even further.
She immerses herself in this craft, creating visceral and honesty-filled experiences of comfort and community.
Ramkilawan tells stories of intimacy, leisure, and celebration through a collaboration of still life, portraiture, and moments through unique uses of material. Talia invites us to experience some of the ways she has accessed pleasure in her world, shamelessly and deservedly.
Instagram: @taliaramkilawan
