my Ayanda Lester

I am a multidisciplinary artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. My work explores the space between abstraction and imagination, using vibrant colour, intuitive mark-making, and layered forms to reimagine botanicals through painting, printmaking, and handwork.

These works act as portals, offering glimpses into post-apocalyptic landscapes where exaggerated leaves, extended stamens, and distorted flora speak to both memory and possibility. I am deeply interested in generational narratives and how they shape our identity, our sense of belonging, and the stories we inherit. At the same time, I consider how these stories can evolve, how we can learn from them, challenge them, and reshape them.

My practice is rooted in this tension between inheritance and transformation. With a personal lineage tied to a great-grandmother who grew flowers. It offers me both a connection to the past and a place to imagine anew, where colour is allowed to bleed, where imperfection is intentional, and where forms drift between the familiar and the fantastical.

My work is an invitation to pause, to feel, and to imagine other ways of seeing and belonging.


Solo exhibitions:

To See Another, Ground 2025

Threads of Land, LUMI Gallery 2025

Tell me what you would miss, RMB Latitudes 2024

Thumb-suck, Ground Art Cafe, Cape Town, December 2022

Yesterday’s Fire: A Print Retrospective, Ogūn, Cape Town, February 2020
Return to Land, Return to Skin, Ground Art Café, Cape Town, July 2019
I LOVE PLANTS SO MUCH, Ground Art Café, Cape Town, January 2017

Selected group exhibitions:

2025 Fiction No End Contemporary

2024 The Motherlode, 6 Spin Street

2022 In Utero RK Contemporary, Riebeek Kasteel

2021African Feminism: Home of The Empties, Goethe-Institut South Africa

2021 2020Home is Where The Art Is, Zeitz MOCCA 2018Close Encounters, SMITH STUDIO, Cape Town 

2020 Splinter, Stay Home Gallery, Online 

2018 Close Encounters, SMITH STUDIO, Cape Town,

2017 What Art is FOR: A group show, 169 Victoria, Cape Town


2017 Cape Town Art Fair, Eclectica Contemporary, Cape Town


2017 Folly, SMITH STUDIO, Cape Town


2016 Symbiosis: A group show, Eclectica Contemporary, Cape Town

Selected features:

House and Leisure 2025

Living Space 2023

Woman and Home 2023

VISI Magazine 2022, 2023

2019 “Motherhood in Motion: Amy Ayanda Lester’s ‘Return to Land, Return to Skin’ ” Artthrob 

Marie Claire 2018

At Home with Amy Ayanda, The Way of Us 2017

Amy Ayanda: The Many Layers of Womxnhood, Texx and the City; Interview with Amy Ayanda, The Fuss