Phulusho
Ngomane was born in 1995 at eGame (a semi-rural settlement located in between
the outskirts of both White River & Hazyview) in Mpumalanga. Phulusho
operates as an illustrator, painter, and visual artist, currently living and
working as a freelance illustrator based in Pretoria, Gauteng.
Ngomane
holds a BTech qualification in Fine and Applied Art from the Tshwane University
of Technology.
The
work of Ngomane focuses on the policing of black men and women's hair through predetermined grooming standards that are/have been set in place in
schools and the corporate working environment.
From
post-slavery till today, black women & black men’s hair has to conform to
certain societal expectations in order to be taken seriously in various
business enterprises and institutions. Citing how the word professional tends
to denote a certain kind of identity with limited hairstyling options for
black men and women, Ngomane questions these modes of corporate identity and
how it relates to hair.
Through
his body of work Ngomane elevates & celebrates the aesthetics of natural
African hair, thus including the manner it's often variously styled and carried
by both females & males, more especially how it defies the archaic western
draconian standards of beauty that have been policing people of Africa and of
African descent on how they should style and carry their own natural hair.
