Oni Speelman

Oni Speelman is a Cape Town-based painter whose practice explores intimacy, identity and memory through the lived experiences of women loving women. They studied Fine Art Practice and Art History and Visual Culture at Rhodes University.

Their work centres everyday connections and moments of vulnerability that are often left out of dominant pictures of South African culture, making space for queer women and people to exist with agency, joy and belonging.

Working from personal photographs, Oni turns intimate memories into large, emotionally charged oil paintings that sit somewhere between documentation and reconstruction. The body and its gestures carry memory and emotional residue.

Rather than fixing identity in place, forms dissolve, blur and fragment. The paintings ask who gets to be remembered, represented and seen, and what we choose to preserve.