DNA meets metaphor in unique arts with science programme

17 February 2026 - Wits University

Postdoc poet Dr Tebogo Matshana explores memory, ancestry and change in the body through artist-in-lab fellowship at genomics institute.

Dr Tebogo Matshana is the new ArtSci4Innovation Postdoctoral Fellow based at the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB) at Wits University.

This nine-month fellowship, spearheaded by the Wits Innovation Centre (WIC), places artists inside science and engineering laboratories to create new forms of dialogue between artistic practice and scientific research.

Through this residency, Matshana hopes to explore how genomic research in South Africa might inform new forms of poetic storytelling and visual interpretation.

Meanwhile, having an artist embedded at the SBIMB for the first time marks a shift in how science can be experienced. Known for its work in genomics, disease risk and African genetic diversity, the Institute is now also opening space for science engagement through emotion, metaphor, and story.

As a visual artist working with poetry, data, and visual metaphor, Matshana is drawn to SBIMB’s research into genetics, ancestry, and environmental risk factors for disease. The Institute’s biobank, which houses DNA and blood samples from across the continent, is particularly compelling to her because it raises symbolic questions about how stories are embedded not only in memory and culture but also in cells and the body itself.

She will spend time with genomic scientists and allow fragments of conversation to become emotional and poetic entry points.

She is inspired by insights by Deepak Chopra, who says, “Every cell in your body listens to your thoughts.”  This suggests cells and biological systems are receptive to emotional and environmental states.

Through this art–science collaboration, Matshana believes she can make complex biological relationships emotionally legible to broader audiences.

Curiosity sits at the centre of how she works.

She follows what pulls her emotionally and what her intuition responds to. This, she says, is what she learned in art school—follow your heart and the rest will come.

“I am applying a practice-based research methodology in this collaborative creative project. Presently in its formative phase, the process naturally lends itself to an iterative approach, unearthing embodied knowledge, which is revealed through the act of mark-making,” says Matshana. “At this point, my process is to a stream-of-consciousness rhythm of creating and reflecting, reflecting and then creating, continually interrogating the ‘why?’ underlying each mark and repeating this cycle until I arrive at something that feels both visually and thematically resonant. This is what I follow down the respective rabbit hole.”

Poetry is one of her main ways into science. When she hears a term like ‘DNA repair,’ she does not only hear a technical process. She asks what “repair” feels like. The images that come to her mind are stitching, mending, and healing. She links this to artist Louise Bourgeois, who described sewing as a process of emotional repair; Matshana is interested in what scientific language feels like in the body, what memory it triggers, and how it can become sensory.

Matshana has not fixed on one subject yet, but is drawn to ideas such as DNA repair, gene conversion, heritability, and the body remembering. She is interested in how exposure shapes cells, how susceptibility to illness develops, how multiple conditions intersect, and how environment and biology are entangled. What fascinates her is not only the mechanism, but how illness and risk are lived.

She points to the work of poet Stacey Hardy, who lives with tuberculosis and writes about it intimately, “in a way science rarely does.”

Visually, Matshana is drawn to layers and time. She loves working with onion skins in Photoshop, where the past, present and future can be seen together. She is inspired by artists such as Geraldine Ondrizek, whose architectural works house biological information. Ondrizek prints chromosomes on translucent material so that generations overlap. For Matshana, this speaks to transparency, memory and seeing across time.

Professor Michèle Ramsay, Director of SBIMB, says that blending art and science opens new ways of seeing and asking questions. “I think artists and scientists are very alike in that they’re both driven by curiosity and a desire to investigate the unknown,” she says. She adds that science often reduces experience to data and models, and that having an artist in the Institute allows for “science to be interrogated emotionally. Matshana’s interpretations will help us think about our work and its impact from an entirely different perspective.”

Poetry and visual poetry sit at the heart of Matshana’s practice because they prioritise intimacy. The cell, she feels, also carries this intimacy, holding information that is unseen yet deeply influential. Her project will explore the resonance between cellular change, ancestral memory, and ecological belonging, connecting these themes to SBIMB’s commitment to contemporary genomic science in South Africa.

This residency also opens new directions in her work. Her interest in light, soil and seed as both biological and metaphorical systems connects with her background in interactive artist books and digital narrative design.

Professor Christo Doherty, Director of the WIC, says, “Working in a scientific environment will allow Matshana to strengthen the rigour of her metaphors, access new forms of data and develop more ethically sensitive approaches to storytelling that recognise the complexity of medical and genomic research in African contexts.

He explains that, in turn, “Matshana offers scientists at SBIMB the opportunity to engage with the humanistic, spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of molecular science, and to explore how visual art and digital intervention can help public audiences imagine illness, inheritance and resilience.”

The fellowship extends Matshana’s earlier work on birdsong, migration and diaspora through oral Setswana poetry, visual metaphor, and animation. She previously worked with Setswana-speaking communities to record and animate oral poems about birds, creating a digital archive that preserves and activates cultural memory.

With this new project with the Institute, Matshana shifts from the migratory bird to the microscopic seed, and from movement across land to inheritance within the body. “The underlying question remains the same,” she says. “How do memory, ancestry and change live in the body and the landscape, and how can visual metaphor help us understand that relationship?”