Lerato Motau is an incredible artist who uses her dyslexia to weave beautiful stories. This is hers:
Soweto, South Africa (27 August 2023) — Exchanging words for colourful fibres, Lerato Motau is weaving her own way of storytelling.
The Fibre Textile Artist and teacher from Soweto’s Orlando West has put many concepts into embroidered tellings, like womanhood, friendship and even thoughts about the universe. However, the thread tying her storytelling medium together and the reason she has cultivated visual magic in the way she does is because of her dyslexia.
With each work, Lerato Motau is breaking stigmas around the dyslexic community.
In turn, her work has inspired South Africa’s art scene and those beyond it, to see dyslexia in a reframed, beautiful channel for creation.
After getting her Fine Arts degree, Lerato became committed to turning dyslexia into her creative fuel.
“My work represents me as a person because I am able to speak my journey of dyslexia using visual percpetion as communication—no words, but a story that speaks volumes in terms of how you look at the work and how it makes you feel, she says.
“I can heal myself in terms of each and every stitch, which represents my emotions and my healing,” she adds.
Her work has been praised for its vibrant mashangane colours as much as it has been praised for its authenticity.
“When you use your hands, it becomes authentic. It’s like I am stitching my wounds and it represents me as a person telling my story.”—Lerato Motau.
Motau’s work has been commissioned throughout the country, including embroidered public artwork for the Vaal Campus of the North West and in Vilakazi Street. One of her long-term projects (Friendship Skirts) even made it onto a documentary in Beijing before heading to a fashion show in Johannesburg.
She is another local artist adding her voice to enabling people to dream beyond their circumstances, something true to SA’s art scene.
You can keep up with her work on social media or in person at the upcoming Handmade Contemporary Festival.
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