Mapping the Self: Percy Manyonga’s Textile Revolution at Loft 3

Percy Manyonga’s new exhibition Becoming Myself at Loft 3 marks a bold shift into textile-based art, blending string, fibre and conceptual depth to chart identity (image source)

Walking into Loft 3 Gallery this month feels like stepping into a room woven with intimate confessions. Percy Manyonga’s latest solo exhibition, Becoming Myself, marks a decisive shift in his two-decade career as he pivots from mixed media and paint toward a wholly textile-driven practice. What might have seemed a dramatic departure instead feels like a natural evolution, as though he has finally arrived at the visual language he has long been approaching.

Manyonga’s turn to thread, string and fibre comes at a moment when Harare’s contemporary art scene is shaped by prominent figures such as Kresiah Mukwazhi, Gina Maxim, Moffat Takadiwa, Johnson Zuze and Wallen Mapondera. In such a charged landscape, stylistic divergence can invite scepticism. Yet Manyonga has continued to secure his place in the national canon, featuring in major exhibitions including FIVE BHOBH: Painting at the End of an Era at Zeitz MOCAA and This is Our World at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Loft 3 now gives him full room to expand, allowing his strings to twist, breathe and define their own space.

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Conceptually, the exhibition draws from the transformation of a point into a line, a knot and finally an object, echoing the logic of String Theory—the physics model that imagines the universe built from vibrating filaments. Manyonga invokes this framework not scientifically, but emotionally. His works gesture toward unseen dimensions: psychological tangles, buried memories and personal histories that stretch beneath the visible surface.

The visual language of the exhibition is richly layered. Thick Forest presents a dense, interlocking mass of thread that evokes undergrowth and depth. Other works resemble anatomical diagrams, neural pathways or topographical sketches. Portrait-based abstractions such as Marjorie Mejuri and Wishful Thinking trade literal likeness for emotional mapping. Searching The Light, composed against a darkened field, dramatises the moment illumination breaks through shadow, while Diamond Field echoes the geometric repetition of aerial farmland.

In Silver Lining I & II, Manyonga incorporates poly woven potato pockets—an unexpected material that widens his textural vocabulary and underscores his commitment to reinvention. Across the exhibition, media and process operate not as tools but as revelations, aligning with the show’s title. Becoming Myself reads as a personal excavation, with each piece marking a stage in the artist’s unfolding self-definition.

As Gareth Nyandoro’s kucheka cheka technique and Troy Makaza’s silicone sculptures have broadened the possibilities of Zimbabwean contemporary art, Manyonga’s string-based practice presents another expansion of the field. His work builds a new lexicon—one where thread becomes thought, knot becomes memory and fibre becomes identity. In the quiet of Loft 3 Gallery, the viewer is left with the sense that this is not merely an exhibition but a declaration: an artist meeting himself in full, through a medium that speaks in vibrations, layers and lines.