The Archaeology of Everyday Life: FNB Art Prize Winner Kelebogile Marope on Memory, Absence and the Language of Sculpture
Following her recognition as the 2026 FNB Art Prize winner, Botswana-born sculptor Kelebogile Marope reflects on more than a decade of artistic investigation into domestic objects, invisible labour and the material traces of human existence. In an extensive conversation with Artweb Africa, she reveals how the intellectual foundations established during her studies at Rhodes University have evolved into a deeply personal sculptural language concerned with memory, grief and the archaeology of everyday life.
A household object is rarely considered remarkable. A folded bedsheet, a washbasin, an ironing board or a tiled bathroom wall belongs to the ordinary architecture of domestic existence. These objects are encountered repeatedly, often without conscious attention, their significance seemingly exhausted by their practical functions. Yet for Kelebogile Marope, the domestic environment contains an extraordinary archive of human experience.
Over more than a decade, the Botswana-born artist has developed a sculptural practice that examines the relationship between objects, memory and the human body. Her work interrogates how familiar materials acquire meaning through repeated use, how domestic spaces register the passage of time, and how the physical absence of a person can become perceptible through the objects they leave behind. Her recognition as the 2026 FNB Art Prize winner brings renewed attention to a practice whose conceptual foundations extend back to her postgraduate investigations. What emerges from Marope's reflections is not simply an account of artistic development, but a sustained philosophical enquiry into the nature of everyday existence. Her sculptures ask a deceptively simple question: what remains of our lives in the things we use?
Marope's relationship with domestic space began with an experience of displacement. Born in Botswana and educated in South Africa, she spent formative years moving between her family home and boarding school, negotiating different environments, routines and expectations. The experience complicated her understanding of belonging. At boarding school, daily life was organised through institutional schedules. At home, similar activities were shaped by intimate family relationships. Both environments offered forms of familiarity, yet neither remained entirely unchanged by her movement between them.
"Boarding school taught me that home could be recreated," she explains. "I could find familiarity and belonging within an institution, even while knowing that my stay was temporary."
Returning to Botswana during school holidays introduced another form of estrangement. Family life had continued in her absence, while her experiences in South Africa had subtly altered her own habits and perspectives. She was simultaneously learning to belong somewhere new and discovering that this process transformed her relationship with the place she had left. These experiences would become central to her artistic development. Rather than understanding home as a fixed geographical location, Marope began to consider it as a constantly negotiated relationship between the individual, the body and the surrounding environment.
An apparently insignificant encounter with a household washbasin would crystallise this enquiry. Returning home after a long journey from boarding school, she entered the bathroom to brush her teeth. Everything appeared familiar until she bent over the washbasin. Its height felt wrong. The object had not changed. Her body had. Accustomed to the washbasins at boarding school, she experienced a moment of disorientation within a house she had known since childhood.
"The wash basin had not changed, but my relationship with it had," she recalls.
This seemingly minor incident opened a profound conceptual possibility. An inanimate object could become unfamiliar, even animated, through a change in bodily perception. The experience revealed that our relationship with objects is neither passive nor fixed. Objects participate in the construction of familiarity, identity and belonging. For Marope, this became an entry point into sculpture.
Her 2013 graduate exhibition at Rhodes University provides an important historical reference for understanding the development of her sculptural language. Works including Perfectly Folded Sheets, They Will Never Finish Again, Clean Animation and Concealed explored the symbolic and material dimensions of ordinary household objects.
In Perfectly Folded Sheets and They Will Never Finish Again, Marope recreated familiar domestic objects using crystacal, transforming materials associated with softness, flexibility or everyday utility into rigid sculptural forms. The transformation disrupted the viewer's expectations. A bedsheet that could no longer be unfolded or a household object rendered incapable of performing its intended function became something fundamentally different. Its practical purpose was suspended, allowing other meanings to emerge. Accumulated sheets, toilet rolls and mops suggested domestic routines and the continuous labour required to maintain a household. These objects were not merely representations of things found inside a home. They were material propositions about how everyday activities structure human experience.
"I was beginning to explore how sculpture could make us reconsider something we thought we already knew," Marope explains.
The exhibition also introduced questions concerning cleanliness, purity and the cultural meanings attached to whiteness. Her interest in perfectly folded white sheets extended beyond their physical appearance to the social associations embedded in domestic materials. Living in South Africa encouraged her to consider how the symbolism of whiteness might also intersect with racial meanings. This expanded the conceptual possibilities of the household object beyond personal experience. The domestic environment became a site through which broader social structures could be examined.
Thirteen years later, the significance of these early investigations lies in their continuity with her current practice. The fundamental concern remains the relationship between objects and human experience.
What has changed is the increasing importance of time, memory and absence.
One of the most compelling aspects of Marope's early installations is the absence of the human figure.
Bedsheets are folded. Floors appear clean. Household objects are arranged in ways that imply repeated activity.
Yet the people responsible for these actions remain unseen. This absence is not incidental. It forms part of a larger investigation into the relationship between labour, visibility and the domestic environment. She became particularly interested in the work performed by domestic workers and women responsible for maintaining their own households. Domestic labour, she observes, often becomes invisible precisely because it has been successfully completed. A clean room appears natural and orderly, concealing the physical effort required to produce that condition.
"We often notice it most clearly when it has not been done."
This observation introduces a significant social dimension to her sculptural practice. Domestic order is not simply an aesthetic condition. It is the outcome of repeated human actions, often performed by individuals whose contributions remain unacknowledged.
Marope's sculptures draw attention to this contradiction. The absence of visible marks can itself become evidence of labour. A polished surface records human activity differently from a worn surface, but both register the relationship between the body and its environment. Her work therefore complicates the conventional distinction between presence and absence. The body may be missing from the sculptural composition, yet its actions remain legible through the objects it has touched, arranged, cleaned or transformed.
As Marope's practice developed, her attention increasingly shifted from the symbolic meanings of objects to their capacity to preserve evidence of time. Her encounter with archaeology proved particularly influential.
Archaeological thinking encouraged her to examine ordinary materials not only in terms of their immediate function but also as records of human activity. Wear, residue, impressions and alterations became significant.
An object could reveal something about the people who had used it, the gestures repeated around it and the environments in which it existed.
"Archaeology helped me understand that an ordinary object could hold information about a life," she explains.
This conceptual shift is important. Where her earlier sculptures often transformed familiar objects to interrupt their everyday meanings, her later work increasingly investigates the physical evidence already contained within domestic materials. The household becomes a continuously evolving archaeological site. But unlike conventional archaeological excavations, which frequently investigate the remains of distant societies, Marope's enquiry begins within the intimate spaces of contemporary family life.
The development of Archaeologies of Use marks a particularly significant stage in Marope's artistic evolution.
The body of work emerged through an increasingly personal engagement with family history, grief and the physical traces of human presence. Its conceptual origins can be traced, in part, to an unexpected conversation surrounding Perfectly Folded Sheets. When Marope's mother encountered the earlier work, she recalled that her own mother had worked washing sheets and shirts. The sculpture had brought forward a family history previously unknown to the artist. A domestic object became a point of connection between generations. This discovery revealed another possibility within her practice: sculpture could function not only as a representation of memory but also as an instrument through which forgotten or unspoken histories are recovered.
The experience became more profound following the death of her father. Marope recalls that ironing was part of his daily routine. The repeated movement of his hand, the release of steam and the rhythm of the activity remained vivid in her memory. What had once appeared ordinary acquired a different significance through his absence. These remembered gestures informed Excavation of Use.
"When I watched my father iron, for example, I did not know that these moments would become memories I would replay over and over again."
The memory of ironing becomes more than a recollection of domestic activity. It is transformed into a meditation on repetition, care, time and the emotional significance of everyday gestures.
Another work, Residual Memory, developed through an alteration to the family home. Following her father's passing, Marope's mother renovated her bathroom. The removal of tiles exposed impressions left on the underlying surface. For Marope, these physical traces became inseparable from the changes taking place within the family. A seemingly practical act of renovation revealed the material evidence of something no longer present. The removed tiles had left their marks.
In Residual Memory, absence becomes physically perceptible. The work exemplifies the conceptual progression from the transformed household object to the domestic surface understood as an archive.
It also demonstrates how Marope's sculptural practice has become increasingly concerned with the relationship between material evidence and emotional experience. Yet the personal histories embedded in these works do not necessarily require the viewer to know the circumstances of their creation. Their significance also lies in the broader recognition that ordinary environments preserve traces of human relationships.
Marope's engagement with domestic objects belongs to an extensive art-historical conversation concerning material transformation, repetition, memory and the relationship between objects and human experience.
She identifies Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread as particularly important influences in the development of her sculptural language. Salcedo's treatment of furniture and domestic materials demonstrated how sculpture could bear witness to human suffering and political violence without directly representing the individuals involved. For Marope, this suggested ways in which an object could communicate a human story through absence.
Whiteread's sculptural investigations of beds and the spaces surrounding familiar objects provided another important reference. Her casting processes demonstrated how overlooked or seemingly empty spaces could acquire physical form. These encounters helped Marope develop her own experiments with casting, material transformation and the relationship between the visible and invisible.
Her intellectual influences extend beyond visual art. The writings of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton informed her understanding of the relationships between people and domestic objects.
Literature also played an important role. Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions encouraged Marope to revisit her experiences of boarding school and reconsider emotions associated with displacement and belonging. Orhan Pamuk's writing deepened her interest in domestic interiors as environments capable of containing complex personal histories. More recently, Terry Kurgan's Everyone Is Present contributed to her reflections on absence and the fleeting nature of domestic experience. Together, these influences reveal the interdisciplinary character of her practice.
Marope's sculptures emerge from a dialogue between lived experience, literature, material research and art history. Yet the recognition of artistic influences also raises a broader question about originality within contemporary sculpture. Domestic objects, casting, repetition and absence are not exclusive to any individual artist. They belong to a shared vocabulary developed across generations and artistic contexts.
How, then, should originality be understood? For Marope, it is not simply a matter of identifying an unprecedented material or visual form.
"I understand artistic originality as something developed through an artist's particular way of seeing, questioning and making."
This position places emphasis on the relationship between artistic methodology and lived experience.
Her sculptural language develops through specific encounters: the unfamiliar height of a washbasin, a grandmother's history of washing sheets, a father's daily ironing routine or the impressions exposed during the renovation of a family bathroom. These experiences generate questions that are subsequently translated into material form. Her 2013 graduate exhibition is particularly relevant to understanding this development. It establishes that her engagement with domestic objects, altered materials and the absent body formed part of her artistic enquiry more than a decade before her recent recognition.
The historical continuity is significant, although chronology alone cannot determine questions of originality.
What the documented progression reveals is the sustained development of an identifiable set of artistic concerns. Marope has returned repeatedly to domestic materials, but the questions she asks of them have evolved.The object first encountered through unfamiliarity becomes, over time, a record of labour, memory and loss. The development is conceptual as much as formal.
Marope's selection as the 2026 FNB Art Prize winner represents an important moment in a practice developed through years of research and experimentation. Yet her interpretation of the award is notably measured.
Rather than understanding the recognition as the culmination of her artistic investigation, she sees it as an affirmation of questions that continue to unfold.
"I interpret the recognition as an affirmation of an enquiry that has continued to unfold for more than a decade."
Art prizes frequently direct public attention towards a particular moment in an artist's career, creating the impression of sudden emergence. Marope's artistic development suggests a different narrative. The intellectual foundations of her current work were established through sustained engagement with domestic environments, material experimentation and interdisciplinary research. Her more recent investigations did not abandon those early concerns. Instead, they deepened them.
The transition from Inanimate/Animate to Archaeologies of Use reveals an artist progressively expanding the possibilities of a central enquiry. Initially concerned with how familiarity shapes our perception of household objects, Marope has increasingly examined how those objects register time and preserve evidence of human existence. Experiences of grief and loss have added emotional complexity to this investigation, while archaeology has provided a framework for understanding the material traces of everyday life.
Her practice also demonstrates how sculpture can generate knowledge. The making of Perfectly Folded Sheets prompted the revelation of her grandmother's history of domestic labour. The development of Archaeologies of Use allowed personal memories and family experiences to enter a wider conversation about care, belonging and absence. In these instances, artistic production becomes a process of discovery.
The sculpture does not simply communicate an existing story. It can bring previously unrecognised histories into view. This is among the most compelling contributions of Marope's practice to contemporary African sculpture. Her work suggests that the domestic environment, frequently regarded as private, ordinary or peripheral to historical narratives, contains material evidence through which broader human experiences can be understood.
The household becomes an archive.
The everyday gesture becomes a historical event.
The ordinary object becomes a carrier of memory.
All photographs coutersy of the artist.
© 2026 Artweb Africa
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