Cow Mash

The artworks of Kgaogelo Mashilo, who refers to herself as Cow Mash serves as an investigation into the symbolic and cultural nuances of the cow with the Sepedi tradition.
Using the cow as a metaphoric representation of women, Cow Mash explores and meshes together visual elements of both the cow and the female figure. Her work taking the form of two and three dimensions is made up of drawings on synthetic leather and sculpture, she employs various fabrics and synthetic wools and other mediums as she reflects on the evolution of culture and tradition.
Her work illuminates and expresses the lived experience of being a black woman in this contemporary world, within the binary environments of the rural and cosmopolitan while existing in both the traditional and global.
In one of her works Mmadihlofa (second image), Cow Mash places a woman with two sets of breasts mimicking those of the cow on the arm of a chair, looking down by herself. The woman is carefully placed on the periphery of the chair without a place to balance her back, heavy are her breasts as she carries the weight of the world on her chest by herself.
Although gloomy the work has a subversive aspect as the base of the chair features a grass mat (legogwa) which is highly used by women in rural areas as a sitting place while the men sit on chairs.
The placement of the legogwa on a raised surface of the chair challenges this institutionalized idea of women sitting or appearing under the eye level of men as she not only places the woman on the chair but elevates her to a higher sitting irrespective of the weight she carries. The use of two sets of breasts could also be regarded as a metaphor for nutrition in the form of wisdom and intellect that women gather with them over the years through their struggles. The wisdom “mayele” that can be passed down from one generation to another as a mother feeds nutritious milk to a child.
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