A burning bush: Lady Skollie’s practice is a spectacle wielding autobiographical mark-making to etch stories of racial identity, power, and agency in the name of beckoning its audiences out of passivity.
Titled Madi Madi, a Setswana term referencing both blood and money, her current exhibition at Everard Read Johannesburg is a reading into capitalism as a lifeline and a trap. A sleight of hand, the title captures money’s slippery slope from revelation to reckoning. Here we see how, like money, Lady Skollie’s practice dances between binaries, never settling into a category. “The whole show is about money because that’s literally what everything is about,” says Lady Skollie on Madi Madi. As she sees it, South Africa’s relationship with money is at a breaking point: a cent away from chaos. A tale of two paths, the artist accounts for the coin’s potential to both lead to bankruptcy or an eternal pay-day as a means to mirror the country’s economic disparities.
To articulate this, Lady Skollie relies on how and what we see. A stark contrast to the relatable, sometimes comforting scenes in Madi Madi, the marks are made in shimmering golds, watery reds, and deep marrons that cue memories of blood clotting at the entrance of wounds. In Rolling Some in The Sun, it leaves the eye uncertain on which cues to process: the woman at ease or the ferrous colours the character is depicted in. These reds and golds, omnipresent throughout Madi Madi, are elemental and unsettling. It is both lifeblood and danger, a reminder of what sustains and what threatens to destroy.
Her mark-making is, as always, a practice of movement, contingency, and restless contemplation. It is as if the works are in constant negotiation with themselves, asking their materials who they are and what they want to be. This is because Lady Skollie has always played with the friction between control and chaos, chance and intent with ease. Her practice, like money, is slippery—it resists easy definitions and dances between binaries, never settling long enough to be pinned down.
Lady Skollie’s Madi Madi also gestures toward what cannot be measured by coins or contracts. Amid the golds and reds, there are figures who lean into joy, women whose reclining poses seem to suggest that liberation can still exist within systems designed to oppress. But this is not a simple kind of freedom—it is laced with tension, haunted by histories of debt and exploitation. By layering sensuality, violence, and economic critique, Skollie asks us to hold contradictions in our gaze and, in doing so, confront our own relationship to money, desire, and survival.
Pleasure comes with pain. Money is kin with blood. The past remains in the present. Central to the artist’s practice, this work of contrasting grief with glory reminds us to ask: “What do you see? And what are you willing to confront?”
At its core, Madi Madi is a meditation on freedom—financial, artistic, and personal. A reminder, Madi Madi leaves its viewers with an assertion: nothing is cheap. Nothing is free. But in the space between blood and money, there is a chance—however fleeting—to claim a different kind of currency: agency, self-determination, and the power to tell your own story.