Talia Ramkilawan: Weaving Intimacy, Identity, and Healing in South African Textile Art

Talia Ramkilawan (b. 1996, Cape Town) is one of South Africa’s most compelling emerging contemporary artists, whose practice uses textile-based techniques, particularly rug-hooking, to explore identity, culture, community, trauma, intimacy, and healing. Moving beyond conventional materials and modes of representation, Ramkilawan has developed a distinctive visual language that combines labour-intensive craft with conceptual depth, embedding personal narratives within broader socio-historical contexts. Her work positions softness as strength, pleasure as resistance, and community as a space of resilience in the face of inherited traumas of displacement, cultural negotiation, and the constraints of post-apartheid identities. 

This essay argues that Ramkilawan’s art not only expands the field of contemporary South African art, frequently dominated by painting and installation, but also re-centres textile work as a site of political, cultural, and emotional engagement. Her tapestries carry a radical tenderness that resists the binaries of rigid identity politics and embraces lived complexity. 

Biography and Formation: Rug-Hooking as Discovery and Practice

Born in Cape Town and raised in Nelspruit, Talia Ramkilawan initially studied sculpture at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. It was only in her fourth year that she discovered rug-hooking, a form she encountered in a video while researching traditional tapestries. Intrigued by the process, she adapted rug-hooking traditionally done with a punch-needle using a crochet needle, wool, and hessian stretched over wooden frames, crafting tapestries that are “adjacent to tapestry” rather than classical weaving. 

This discovery was a breakthrough, not merely technical but psychological. Ramkilawan describes the tactile, slow accumulation of wool as “intimate” and “honest,” a process that allowed her to focus on embodiment, memory, and relationship in ways that sculpture had not. The labour-intensive nature of her work, pulling each strand by hand, often leaving blisters, becomes part of the concept itself: making as a therapeutic practice, a trance-like, reflective labour of love. 

Materiality and Technique: Wool, Hessian, and the Politics of Presence

At the heart of Ramkilawan’s practice is materiality: wool, cloth, hessian, and yarn are not neutral surfaces but carriers of cultural and emotional weight. By repurposing what might be seen as domestic or craft materials into fine art, she challenges long-held aesthetic hierarchies that separate “high art” from “folk art” and “women’s work.” This repositioning is inherently political; it expands the vocabulary of what contemporary art can be and whose voices are centred.

Her technical approach, a hybrid of rug-hooking, tapestry, and textile collage, produces rich, textured surfaces that hold multiple layers of colour, form, and narrative implication. The scale of her works often invites viewers into an immersive experience: each piece unfolds slowly, revealing depth and nuance that reward close engagement. 

Critically, this material practice functions as embodied storytelling. The wool threads do not merely create images; they record a process of becoming, of unravelling and re-weaving experiences of identity, pleasure, trauma, and community. The technique itself, repetitive, accumulative, and physically demanding, serves as a metaphor for the slow and ongoing work of healing from cultural and personal histories. 

Themes: Identity, Trauma, Intimacy, and Pleasure

Ramkilawan’s art consistently navigates the intersections of South African Indian identity, queerness, gender, and cultural memory. Rather than offering a single, unified narrative, her work gestures toward the complex, often contradictory lived realities of identity formation in a post-apartheid context. She describes her practice as grappling with being “Indian, yet not Indian enough,” reflecting a sense of cultural negotiation that many South African Indian people share. 

Portraiture and figuration are recurring elements; human bodies, especially brown womxn, appear as central figures, depicted with tenderness, humour, and vulnerability. These portrayals offer alternative visual languages that refuse stereotypical or reductive representations, instead celebrating nuance, vulnerability, and pleasure. References to everyday moments such as picnics, leisure, or shared conversation affirm the ordinary as worthy of aesthetic exploration and emotional recognition. 

Importantly, Ramkilawan’s work subverts the idea that transformation must emerge from pain alone. She argues that pleasure, softness, intimacy, and community building are equally potent tools for healing and self-affirmation. This emphasis shifts the focus from trauma alone to what might be called affirmative transformation: healing not by erasing pain, but by creating spaces of belonging and joy.

Exhibitions and Public Reception

Ramkilawan’s work has featured in crucial contemporary art contexts. She has participated in group and solo exhibitions, including at galleries and events such as WHATIFTHEWORLD and Everard Read. Her 2022 solo exhibition Pleasure Over Pain at WHATIFTHEWORLD showcased works that reflect erotic tenderness, community rituals, and the pursuit of pleasure in everyday life, presenting tapestry pieces that are visually lush and conceptually layered. 

In 2025, her solo exhibition A Perfect Practice at Everard Read Gallery in Rosebank offered a wider, critical view of her recent body of work. Reviews highlighted her ability to blend soft textures with sharp textual elements, for instance, a piece with scrawled text reading “You’ve only been dating white girls after me, so it doesn’t hurt so much,”  illustrating how her work tackles heartbreak, cultural negotiation, and vulnerability with candour and wit. 

Ramkilawan has also exhibited in satellite spaces associated with major fairs such as the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, which positions her among leading generation-defining artists shaping South Africa’s contemporary art discourse. 

Critical Significance and Contemporary Contribution

Talia Ramkilawan’s practice is significant for several reasons:

1. Expanding Textile Art

Her work challenges assumptions about material hierarchies in contemporary art. By elevating rug-hooking and tapestry into a fine art context, Ramkilawan validates craft as a critical conceptual practice and contributes to a broader revaluation of textiles in contemporary art discourse. 

2. Intersections of Identity

Her focus on South African Indian identity, queerness, and cultural hybridity fills an essential gap in contemporary art narratives, bringing visibility to lived experiences that are too often marginalised or simplified. 

3. Aesthetic and Political Synthesis

Ramkilawan’s work synthesises aesthetic pleasure with political urgency. It refuses to separate joy from critique, beauty from introspection, or softness from resilience, making her practice deeply relevant in a time when art frequently grapples with how to represent both suffering and flourishing. 

Conclusion: Crafting Presence, Healing, and Belonging

Talia Ramkilawan’s art is an invitation to rethink what contemporary art can be and who it can represent. Through the labour of wool-hooked imagery, she creates works that are visually intimate yet politically resonant, that affirm pleasure as a site of resistance, and that position identity as process rather than a fixed category. Her tapestries act as archives of emotion, community, memory, and self-recovery, weaving together personal and collective threads into a broader fabric of post-apartheid cultural discourse.

In doing so, Ramkilawan not only asserts the value of her own lived experience but also offers a space through which others can recognise, reflect, and heal, making her one of the most significant voices in South African contemporary art today.