Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Tide and Seed, a solo exhibition by Ravelle Pillay and her first with the gallery. Featuring a selection of new paintings, this exhibition expresses Pillay’s core thematic considerations and unpacks the historical context that informs her practice.
Featured Artworks
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Studio Visit: Ravelle Pillay’s Journey to Chisenhale Gallery
Pillay uses painting and drawing as a material means through which to explore how colonial legacies have found form in personal and collective memory, the natural world, and in the idea of haunting.
Pillay’s borrowed archive of her grandmother’s photo albums provides a foundation to the subject matter of her paintings and into understanding her family’s history within a larger narrative: the displacement of indentured migrants, the still-present spectres of Apartheid, and of place and belonging. As Pillay writes, “I started to think more about life-making inside of these systems, how lives were made ‘in spite of’ and ‘in defiance’.”
The title of the exhibition is an entry point into Pillay’s metaphorical reflections. ‘Tide’ invokes a foundational thought across this body of work - of the ocean’s agency and desire, allowing ships to sail over its body, and its role as a repository for memory and physical bodies and objects through residence time. While ‘seed’ references life in multiple forms; the unfamiliar landscape those who were indentured found themselves in, and the connections between Natal and other sites of indenture, as well as the seeds, both literal and metaphorical that transformed South African topography. Tide and Seed seeks to invoke shared histories of migration, family and our psycho-geographic connections with the natural world.
Figures merge into scenes of the natural world in Pillay’s paintings. Banana leaves, palm fronds, roots, and pools of water become dense mangroves. Pillay is interested in how the natural world can be a repository for memory and the involuntary role it has had to play in human history – oceans that have held ships and consumed bodies, cane fields that witness and thickets that conceal.
Pillay’s practice is concerned not only with the archive, but with the material possibilities of painting. She often allows paint and mediums to interact in accordance with their natures on the surface of the canvas. The material degradation or evolution over time provides a way to consider the unreliability of memory and to question the act of remembrance. For Pillay, painting is a mediation between past and present - the painting process an act of seeing, and communion with the ghosts that populate our lives.
Artist Bio
Ravelle Pillay (b.1993, Durban, South Africa) is a painter who considers the legacies of colonialism and migration, and how they haunt and reverberate in the present. She draws from found and family photographs, ephemera and oral history, as well as the material degradation of photographic images over time to consider the ways we construct our identities and the ways we remember.
Pillay’s first institutional show, Idyll, opened at Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2023. This followed a residency at Gasworks London at the end of 2022.
Solo shows include Tide and Seed, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg. (2022), The Weight of a Nail, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2024) and Sanctum (the light and the shade), Goodman Gallery, New York (2025).
Select group exhibitions include Silence Calling from One Continent to Another, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2021), (Un)Natural : Constructed Environments at the Nasher Museum of Art (2023-2024), Soulscapes at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2024) and Standing in the Gap, Goodman Gallery, London (2024).
Pillay was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in London, to create a body of work as part of the programme for Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture which opened in September 2025.
Pillay received a degree in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2015 and was the first prize recipient of the 2022 African Art Galleries Association's Emerging Painting Invitational.
She lives and works in London.
