“It was when I found a home within my body that I realised the importance of love for the self” (Doda, 2025).
Yonela Doda’s practice emerges from the body and soul. In her world, pain is stitched into the fabric of being. With AFFLICTIONS, her latest exhibition, we are invited to dive deeper into her allegory, where our exteriors become projections of our inner worlds. Each piece becomes a pathway towards finding a home within oneself, through the investigation and construction of other bodies. Doda does not shy away from raw imagery or the relationship between the body and emotion.
For her, emotion – which, like memory, buries itself in the body – is truth. Her interest in how emotions affect the body is rooted in her own experience. “I feel pain deeply in my heart, and my stomach starts to feel funny, like my organs are hugging each other but in a painful way,” she says. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio offers a striking parallel in The Feeling of What Happens (1999): “Emotions play out in the theatre of the body. Feelings play out in the theatre of the mind… Could it be that while emotion and feeling were twins, emotion was born first and feeling second, with feeling forever following emotion like a shadow?”
In this offering, Doda explores themes of vulnerability, human connection, the fragility of self, and the intricacies of womanhood. Her work reminds us that the body is a constant, and a vessel of identity, as the body never disappears entirely from the sphere of self. Afflictions, here, become the allegorical wounds of existence itself, traced through relationships, memories, and the unseen exchanges between spirit and flesh. Impurities, scars, infections and ailments are devastatingly hard to look at and live with. They’re a cruel reminder of our fragility. And through photography, collages, and stitch work across different mediums, Doda rejects our shame by bringing us face to face with what we often hide from.
As a child, Doda quickly learned the needle’s language by mending torn clothing items for her dolls. To this day, she has brilliantly continued this ritual through the stitching motif in her works. Mending, in her practice, is the act of tending to oneself. The artist firmly believes that the body in many ways becomes the physical manifestation of the spiritual self – and healing is a ritual that must be continuously honoured.
The use of red in contemporary art carries a rich history, signifying strength, love, desire, and power. For Doda, the red thread echoes the human anatomy, where organs which are hidden within our bodies, bring themselves to the surface. The thread becomes a symbol of how the body is both a wound and its own healer. The use of needle and thread also symbolise the act of restoration – “stitching is how I bridge inner worlds together,” she says.
The exhibition space is curated as a confrontation of woundedness. With a medicinal aesthetic, collages are printed on hospital bed sheets. The space is also taken up by a bed with wounded teddy bears in recovery. The pristine environment of a hospital is meant to house the ugliness of survival. And this installation gently reminds us that healing and woundedness become a constant cycle we are to forever navigate. Pieces such as “Is it too late for me?”, “Nobody wants to go to Hell but everyone wants to live a sinful life”, “Never forget who you are or where you come from”, and “you want to be free (Fear is make believe)” are exceptionally layered collages that visually communicate the artist’s philosophy and allegory of the body as both wound and healer.
Teddy bears are a signature motif in her visual language. They cosplay the human's innocence, serving as projections of what Doda calls “such an intimate object that resembles the inner child.” In AFFLICTIONS, these bears are harmed and soiled, echoing how the wounds that mark the body become reference points as we continue to exist. “When we are born, we are slowly dying, decaying, and returning to earth” the artist reflects. Doda has come a long way with her art, and motherhood has become a profound teacher in her journey. Her experience as a parent has been spiritual, bringing her closer to God and offering her new ways to understand her body.
With AFFLICTIONS, Yonela Doda transforms her emotional awareness into a visual language, igniting us with an exhibition as raw and tender as the human experience. As Jennifer Lewis once said, we are as sick as our secrets. Beneath the grotesque and visceral imagery, there is a reminder of life’s beauty, which lies in the art of renewal – with love, time, and death becoming our anchors as much as our teachers. So, may we embrace our afflictions, letting them rise to the surface, for they too need to be seen and tended to.
Written by Nirel Sithole
