"The performance that happens as an artist within that space becomes a political decision to keep the work alive, relevant and moving. If I didn’t I would be ostracised even more."

"In Podor in Senegal, the place where I grew up, everyone is an artist because art in Africa is not a commercial enterprise but is part of life itself."

"Let me explain. When I was young, I used to watch the fishermen by the banks of the Senegal river. They were working close to the desert in intense heat, and whenever they stopped working they would start to sing."

"In Podor, people sing naturally about their experiences, their lives and their relationships. It is not just musicians and singers who perform. Everybody has a part to play - even children are allowed to join in if they have the inspiration. It doesn't matter if your voice is not the finest; everyone is involved."

"Making work is a documentation of a journey - each stage, each process, each dilemma has to be worked through. At one time I felt pressured to do a lot of things at the same time, but now I want to take one step at a time. When you make an artwork you're not just doing something at that moment, you're contributing to an entire history of artmaking."

"Viewing Poynton's work is a personal experience. The story that comes to your mind is different from that of someone else. There is no right or wrong. All ideas and associations are welcome in the world of Deborah Poynton."

"I don’t get why these kids think they’re the first. There’s a lacking in historical referencing and reverencing. Their art doesn’t take any risks. It doesn’t love itself. It doesn’t love people. It’s only interested in power; not even power, it’s all vanity. And I don’t think people are looking at books enough."

"Musicians are respected, but only in the context that the music itself belongs to the community - not to the person who is playing an instrument or singing a song."

"Artists have got to be the interpreters and intermediaries in spaces. So they consume information, they go into these vile, volatile environments and you take all of it. They reconfigure it and put it through their being and then they create these things that cause a shift vibrationally, spirituality, intellectually and emotionally for the people that engage with it. I am also a glutton for information. I consume information all the time. I read. It infiltrates the work."

"By constructing spaces, placing slightly discordant objects amongst seemingly natural landscapes, Poynton creates a tension within her work that is intended to make the viewer uncomfortably aware of the act of perception."

"While most of her work can be categorized as realism, a few series depart from her usual aesthetic in a more abstract project. Her current exhibition, Scenes of a Romantic Nature, draws on her connection to Germany by referencing the landscape paintings of German artist Caspar David Friedrich."

"People from all over the world, who are the most rigorous thinkers, were making work out of stuff in real time. That’s not necessarily paint on canvas; it’s material and matter that speaks. It blew my mind. I cried for a year. I couldn’t. I had a breakdown because I realised the depth of the deception and how far and controlled it was. Seeing people of colour make art in my lifetime blew me the fuck away."

"Her work often conflates tropes from traditional art history, from compositional techniques to poses of her subjects, and the indices of contemporary life to create a sense of chaotic inscrutability; in this way, Poynton creates work which is aesthetically engaging and intellectually confounding."

"Computers and digital technology are becoming very important to African artists, just as elsewhere. I see it with the impact of hip-hop across the continent. You can see it beginning to have an impact on the visual arts."

"I have just carried on doing what I did as a child. It’s been one long continuous stream of making pictures to feel a sense of connectedness. Painting this way is a wordless exclamation….Sometimes people get cross with it because they hate that it’s not about anything, and that I just carry on with all this realism. This fiddle-faddle, this knitting."

"Who cares if you can paint something that looks real? It is totally banal. There is no worth in that, except as a kind of sport, an exercise in hand-eye co-ordination. Now painting something that seems to contain reality – that is truly moving."

"There is relief in dwelling in a not-new picture, in embracing the foolishness of the formula, in discovering the beauty of each small detail that is woven into the picturesque whole. And while we are there, noticing the leaves, the clouds, the way the paint has described the folds of silk, perhaps something indescribable can be felt."

"Art is an offering, a show that mirrors the show we form around ourselves as we move through our scenery."

"I lived in many different places as I was growing up. This gave me an awareness of difference, the understanding that security cannot be found in the outside world."

"Art is always artful, a ruse, a trick. It is a court fool, jumping up and down, aping its masters. Art is part of the dream that we inhabit."

"In life, as in pictures, there is only the Romantic. Behind the scenes of our lives, there is everything unspoken, unseen, unknown and nothing."

"Poynton's paintings are more about the act of looking, of exposing the "trickery" behind traditional artistic practices, than they are windows onto a surreal world."

"“Certain situations in life push you toward extreme decisions,”"

"“While appearing to subscribe to minimalist strategies, Breitz on the other hand owes much to pop. Her work brings the sparse conceptual idiom of the former to bear on the colourful realm of the latter. From the perspective of art history, her method appears as a unique, if not cacophonous, marriage of Sol LeWitt’s formulaic wall-drawings to Warhol’s production line of silk-screened Marilyn Monroes, freshly cooing out of the Factory.”"

"This is how we spent Father’s Day, happy and you had no idea that March 19th was Father’s Day. You completely forgot, because it was days, weeks, a month lying in that bed and always asking what day of the week it was? What time is it? Did the doctor arrive? Anyway. And yesterday, when you said goodbye to me, I noticed something strange in your ‘goodbye’! After all, why would I go back to the clinic today, March 29th, to say goodbye to you again, with tears in my eyes! Forever my father. I will always remember you like this with that smile. There is no departure for those who will remain forever in our hearts!"

"I thought that for this musical genre there was nothing better than being original."

"Grobler' work often incorporates traditional craft techniques such as beadwork and she has collaborated with The Quebeka Bead Studio to produce beaded works."

""Jeanne Hoffman and Liza Grobler have collaborated on a number of projects over the past five years – all of these have been visual reactions to so-called “development” and “progress”."

"Her work resides in many notable collections including the Jeanetta Blignaut Art Consultancy Collection."

"She has participated in close to a hundred group shows both in South Africa and abroad - in Italy, Brazil, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia, Spain, the United States and Finland. She attended residencies and workshops in the US, Norway, Finland and Switzerland."

"The strength of her work lies in the fact that it’s often presented with sheen, sensuous exteriors which allude to the latent libidinal energy that stimulates consumption, as seen in her use of glossy nail varnish."

"Emptiness is a key notion in Goodman’s work to date. Sparkling suitcases – emblazoned with brand logos and covered in sequins, but empty – question the vacuity of global brand fetishism."

"I want to do what I like. I learned with passion the essence of truth, honesty and justice. And in day-to-day life we do not see these things. That did not make me happy.”"

"Goodman’s art focuses specifically on the subject of middle class experience and prejudices; looking at everyday obsessions and superficial behavior (such as fanatic exercise culture and conventions of marriage and beauty) she explores the way individuals respond to our contemporary, highly materialistic society and the idiosyncratic coping mechanisms they develop."

"'Waste at Work combines social awareness, environmental concerns, cultural diversity and visual art in a single project that reflects the heterogeneous population of South Africa.""

"Her works reflects a morbid ambiguity of excess and loss; a dislocation between appearance and truth. ‘Beautiful’ or seductive objects, environments and installations are used as a ruse to obscure the primary subject matter, which is often dark, complicated and messy."

"‘These objects are about how you look, how you show yourself to the world. You pop a little pill when everything is falling apart inside and suddenly you can put on a smiley face, go out into the world and get your work done.’"

"“Rapacious is a fantastic word,” says Goodman. “It means needy and greedy and assertive and aggressive, all these attributes we’re taught to be embarrassed about. We’re taught not to want. ‘Rapacious’ asserts these characteristics that are only criticized in women, not men.”"

"“There’s still a need for feminism and a voice for what women have to contend with that men don’t.”"

"All the addictions I deal with are about keeping up appearances"

"“I don’t buy into your heterosexual traditions. We know that last claim is a lie because in some ways we all do buy into these traditions, it’s very difficult not to.""

"“The mundane, the ordinary and the trivial have always been of interest to me, as I believe they all obscure dark places, issues and emotions that people do not wish to confront.”"

"Goodman makes a mass of thousands of purple acrylic nails into a surging, rippling, mottled object that suggests a vagina but might be a version of the Charybdis that was encountered by Odysseus. Flailing toward the viewer from an adjacent wall, Goodman has fashioned another monster"

"A shift happens where you become governed by your wants rather than your needs. It’s no longer about getting food, paying the bills, survival. Suddenly, it’s all about needing to go to the gym, needing those new shoes or that new car…"

"To insult someone to their face is to invite the possibility of words turning to fists and bullets."

"Racists often don’t realise that their actions are racist,"

"“Women are often asked to make media-influenced choices about our bodies,”"

"If the rules of branding really do apply to bookselling - and the evidence suggests that they do - there is an added complication. If a brand is a set of expectations, those expectations can be a terrible burden"

"“Fake nails and false eyelashes, though, go against that. You’re able to become expressive, to become someone else. You don’t become the idea of who a woman should be. You become the antithesis.”"

"“Yet Goodman, who has been working for some time with the question of how to be a woman who wields femininity and negotiates inherited roles tied to profound ideologies, wants to stay right here in our contradictions. She is telling us that artifice isn’t nothing; it’s trying to make sense of the world of gender roles, as well as one’s place in it.""