Ruschka du Toit / Hope as a soft weapon
Next up in our 2026 line-up: the beautifully titled Hope as a soft weapon, a limited-edition original screen print by none other than Ruschka du Toit.
It demonstrates her idiosyncratic aesthetic: floral forms both ethereal and discernible, dissolving washes of ink, vibrating marks and specks, and a very particular colour palette – including a deep purple-blue-grey she describes exquisitely as “impending doom rendered in the most beautiful, calming hue.”
But, while the artwork visually echoes her paintings, the creative process involved was markedly different from her usual practice. And wonderfully so; it’s the kind of different that makes for rich, experimental collaboration and complementary creative endeavours able to engender something completely new in an artist’s practice. Something unplanned, unpredicted. Something quite magical.
The primary difference in process is that screen printing is much slower than Du Toit’s usual creative pace. Hand-pulled screen printing insists on pauses, intervals and a gradual, graduated span of events. A print is a complex, composite image created layer by carefully considered layer, each requiring hours of creative play, colour mixing, testing and deliberation as well as the very unavoidable factor of drying times. The slower nature of this process, in turn, compels a cognitive slowing down, freeing up mental processes to stretch and move, paradoxically far from stagnant.
Creating these positives offered myriad opportunities for technical play and exploration across the layers of the image and the varying properties of ink, including foamy washes mixed with soap; thin bleeds echoing watercolour; subtle gradients and deep, sinking saturations; distinctive brush work and line details. Even the act of separating the image into the positives – each positive a layer, a screen, a colour – served as a welcome catharsis after a busy year, with familiar motifs untangled, carefully dissected, re-viewed and reassembled – softly processed.
About the artwork: Hope as a soft weapon
Below, Du Toit shares her thoughts about the artwork and the collaborative process:
Making this screen print was incredibly rewarding. My usual practice is fast and instinctive, so this slower, softer pace was a welcome change at the end of a busy year. The 50ty/50ty studio provided a much-needed safe space, a place to experiment without any expectations.
The print originated from a charcoal drawing I made last year, an impression of an orchid. I keep coming back to this sketch; I’ve painted it several times over the past year. There’s a freedom and softness in its marks that I am drawn to. We also pulled inspiration from Japanese woodcuts and two paintings I made this past year – Two Homes and You’ve Held My Hand Through It All.
The background colour of this work feels really important to me. It started as a eucalyptus green which felt fresh and innocent, but not quite right. Over the past year, I’d been collecting reference images of a deep purple-blue-grey colour I couldn’t get out of my head – think, the sky before a storm, or the dense clouds during a tornado. Impending doom rendered in the most beautiful, calming hue. Wim is a real-life colour wizard. He mixed it effortlessly, perfectly matching what I had in mind.
The resulting artwork came together over three days of honest conversations about grief, loss, politics, religion, and the soft weapon of hope. As our talks deepened, the image started to reveal itself, a testament to our time together in the studio and a reminder that to hope is to be brave.
