Mika Márffy (b. Zimbabwe, 1988) grew up between Zimbabwe and Zambia and is currently based in Mkushi, in Zambia’s Central Province.
With a background in Fine Art, Art History, English Literature and Education from Rhodes University South Africa, Mika began curating exhibitions in Lusaka in 2013 and has been working exclusively as an exhibiting artist since 2020.
Mika is primarily a painter working in expressive abstraction.
Following her solo show “A Kind of Alchemy” curated by Sana Ginwalla at the Alliance Française in 2022, Mika is now currently represented by Latitudes Online, where she showed in a group show called “REVERB 23 | Abstract Resonances // Contemporary Voices in February 2023 and their Curators Lab programme featuring contemporary African art by emerging artists from the continent in 2024.
Mika has exhibited at the Artsy Online Exclusive platform by THEFOURTH for their show “Blurring the Lines”.
Recently, her work has also been featured on Hypebeast Africa’s article on “Zambian Art You Should Hang on Your Walls”.
Currently, Mika is developing a practice of womb work where she dives deeper into working from the womb space, further exploring The Sacred Feminine in her artworks and in guided workshops.
A gestation of this concept is her recently initiated ‘Womb Workshops’ which offer women a space to connect with the collective feminine principle and to be guided on their healing and creative journeys, a foray into a greater activation of intuition and embodiment a reclaiming what it is to ‘be woman.
As part of this womb work, Mika is also developing a body of work called A Dictionary of Colour which explores how energies in the body are mapped and translated into colour.
Through an exploratory journey into Self, I access liminal states of being and mind that allow me to navigate various planes of consciousness. My work is a portal into remembering the Sacred Feminine, whereby the ‘bones’ of women’s stories, templates from the imaginal worlds, collective images of the unconscious, and visions drawn from dreams and alternative states of consciousness become the landscapes through which my paintings awaken.
In these landscapes I witness individual as well as collective memory, making my process an exercise of transmuting energy and pain into healing and art, an exercise in finding the beautiful in the mundane, ultimately an exercise in greater consciousness itself.
My paintings thus become a sacred space where process and female intuition become layered with concepts of healing, energy and ‘the centre’. These concepts are translated into elements of colour, form and texture that are ever seeking a yin and yang balance in their compositions, this balance being the energetic axis upon which the paintings crucially turn.
Working in abstraction, colour becomes a mode of conveyance for me as form would be.
Colour is the vehicle of concept – a reference point in which to ground oneself in the painting as both viewer and artist. The Sacred Feminine continually informs my process as I seek this ‘centre’ towards healing and wholeness in self.