In an interview given two years ago, Simphiwe credited the lack of restraints placed upon him as a child and the dominance of imagination as a strong point in his practice:

“When I was a kid, I was already drawing before I started going to school…we made our own toys and miniature furniture from clay. No one knew what we were doing but we made our toys from wire, discarded boxes, and broken toys. Imagination was really at play at the time…We didn’t have paper and paints so we would use sticks to engrave different types of games on the street…We had no limitations…” (from GNYP “Simphiwe Ndzube” Marta Gnyp for Zoo #54 March 2017).

There were no limitations in the recent “Uncharted Lands and Trackless Seas” (Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town).   In the aptly named “Echoes of the First Stories”, beings journey through a fabricated “Mine Moon” –  a resplendent landscape effused with ginger-like cloudbanks, rivers, spiked plants and enigmatic figures.  Simphiwe masterly weaves in color – olive, pea green, crimson, baby blue, electric blue, violet and pink. The interjection of pattern, curlicues and speckled mark-making keep the eye in play. The effect is mesmerizing.  Consider “Mpunguzo: Chief of the Spirit People”; the protagonist sports a cosmic patterned shirt, striped trousers and a wide-brimmed sun hat. His countenance resembles a purple tufted pelt. Could it be Mongolian fur? The shock of a canary-yellow kitchen glove gives a change in palette. A similar free-standing figure “Bhazuka: Michael Jackson of Mine Moon” arches as if in mid-dance. Could he be performing the moonwalk? Ndzube stated, ‘We begin in the real world and through interaction with the work enter a fabulist tale in progress. I’ve attempted to create the genesis of a cosmology that [found] itself in the “uncharted lands and trackless seas” I [called] the Mine Moon. It emerges from the tradition of magical realism and is expanding to points currently unknown.”