ARTIST PROFILE

Zelda Stroud is a sculptor and multimedia artist who also teaches art history at Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, South Africa. She has an MA(FA) from the University of Pretoria.

She has at various times taught sculpture, life-drawing, jewellery-manufacture and art history at different universities, has built architectural models, sculpted waxwork figures for museums and has produced more than a dozen life-size bronze figurative sculptures for public commissions.

Her personal artwork reflects her fascination with text, skill, jewellery, model-making, and the human body and mind.

Zelda Stroud’s work expresses her interest in the social and economic manipulation of individuals (mainly women) by the media, peer pressure and their social environments.

Much of her work is also about duality within art and art-making: the relationship between skill and idea, the traditional and the conceptual, and how to reconcile those.

The artist is interested in how women (particularly older women) see themselves, their different passions, and how society perceives them.

Her work often combines personal items such as hair, nail clippings and clothing to create contemporary talismans/reliquary items that reflect the social and financial implications of the pressure to conform to successful (often middleclass) stereotypes.

Her belief in the ability of art to effect social transformation is manifest in her work.

She has recently rediscovered an interest in printmaking (especially etching), after a break of more than 30 years.