Virginia Chihota’s deeply introspective practice unfolds as a search for self, belonging, and spiritual transformation. Working across screen-printing, drawing, and painting, she creates layered, dreamlike compositions in which figures emerge, dissolve, and reappear through fields of color, texture, and gesture.

Guided by intuition and what she describes as “a sustained act of listening,” Virginia’s works meditate on intimacy, kinship, faith, bereavement, motherhood, and the shifting emotional landscapes that shape the human experience.

Repetition plays a central role in Virginia’s practice; the act of revisiting the same image or gesture is a devotional process through which questions are carried, transformed, and answered. Her works often feel like layered rooms where dreams, memories, and fragments of life converge across the past, present, and future.

In this episode, Elodie sits down with Virginia to discuss her journey of becoming an artist, why art is, for her, about “a continuous search for self,” and the true value of art.

A conversation about intuition, creation as a spiritual act, and the role identity, place and transformation play in one’s work.

2:30 - Virginia’s first meaningful art experience and journey of becoming an artist

7:58 - Discovering printmaking

11:45 - What drives Virginia’s practice

14:16 - Finding inspiration from other women

18:18 - Virginia’s process

24:52 - On Virginia’s exhibition Kupinduka

28:52 - On surrender and resistance

31:40 - Art, value, and the market

34:40 - Working with Lotte de Beer on her adaptation of Aida

38:39 - Virginia’s relationship to the viewer

Virginia Chihota is a multi-disciplinary artist. She graduated with a certificate in Fine Art from the National Gallery B.A.T Visual Art Studios in 2004, followed by a diploma in Fine Art from Harare Polytechnic in 2006. She represented Zimbabwe at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 and was awarded the Prix Canson the same year. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is included in collections such as the Centre Pompidou, Tate, and the Astrup Fearnley Collection.

For more, follow the show on Instagram @permanentdaydream.