However spare Iqunjelwe might appear, however non-figurative its image, the composition and its title are evocative of intestinal churning. “There’s nothing descriptive here” – as writer Anna Stielau says of the artist’s other such ‘paintings’ – “nothing but an action embedded in material, yet the result is equally seductive and grotesque.” Comprising wandering lines stitched in satin ribbon that converge on an amorphous form made from salvaged inner tubing, the work has about it a sense of rupture, the canvas puckering where it was cut and later sutured. The effect is discomforting; the sense of abjection, of inside-made-outside, conveyed with compositional restraint. Even without intimations of blood or fleshy wound, the somatic suggestion, the organic spilling, gestures to the function (and more often dysfunction) of the body as apparatus. That the work’s title translates as ‘constipated’ extends further reflections to physical and psychic, even spiritual, frustrations – and perhaps those of South Africa’s body politic too. “Given the history of this country, the process of trying to rebuild a new culture gives the stitch a metaphorical quality,” Hlobo said in conversation with Sean O’Toole. “It’s almost as if we are stitching bits and pieces of history together to build something new.” Blockages remain; obstacles to be negotiated in the pursuit of long-deferred ambitions.