Danielle-Raye Bischoff
Cape Town, WC
Danielle-Raye Bischoff born 1985. is a photographic artist and storyteller whose work explores memory, identity, and the quiet power of creative persistence.
Message
About me
-Born 1985, Pretoria, South Africa. Lives on the Southern Peninsula of Cape Town.
I’m a photographic artist, children’s book author, and postpartum doula. My work is rooted in a love of visual storytelling and the quiet power of emotional truth.
I’ve worked across film, photographic, and theatre industries, guided by a lifelong love of the visual arts and a curiosity about what gives images emotional truth and meaning. I’ve always been drawn to the places where image and story meet, where art becomes a way to see, to feel, and to make sense of both the world and myself.
My creative practice is inseparable from my experience of motherhood. It has evolved alongside my daughter’s growing up: her presence shaping my rhythm, perspective, and patience. This blending of life and art feels honest to me: creation mirrored in cycles of care, attention, and daily rituals that define our shared life. Much of what I make begins at the dining room table where our everyday lives unfold: drawings beside homework, ink stains between meals. This space of making feels both domestic and sacred: a reminder that creativity and caregiving need not exist apart.
Through both photography and drawing, I explore the quiet intersections of personal and collective experience. My work is a dialogue between inner and outer worlds: between memory and imagination, control and release, fear and faith in the process.
I’ve co-written and produced two children’s books with the Florence & Watson family, and I continue to explore new ways of storytelling, through both image and word. I’ve co-written and produced two children’s books with the Florence & Watson family, and I continue to explore new ways of storytelling, through both image and word. Florence & Watson is a South African creative storytelling collective founded by Danielle Bischoff, Lauren Fowler, Rob van Vuuren, and Siv Ngesi, producing children’s books and theatre that nurture literacy, environmental awareness, and imagination.
Themes of youth, adolescence, and motherhood run through both my photography and my artwork. They are the threads I keep returning to. These stories often overlap, shaped by my own experiences and a desire to question how we define family, love, and belonging.
Statement
Artist Statement
In my latest body of work, I draw inspiration from a rich tapestry of artistic traditions that transcend time and geography.
Influenced by the Indigenous cultures of !Kung San in Southern Africa, the Huni Kuin of South America, and the Aboriginal peoples of Australia (First Nations).
I honour and incorporate the ancient pictorial storytelling traditions that these cultures used for communication and processing the human experience, integrating these visual narratives into my own artistic practice.
I embrace the symbolic language, mark-making, and storytelling that connect/link art to ancestry and land. These traditions, where image and narrative intertwine, inform my exploration of memory, belonging, and transformation.
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Conception is a body of work that has unfolded over the last five years. Some pieces completed recently, others reawakened after long periods of being stuffed under my bed. It began, and ultimately returned, to the same place: my dining room table.
This work has not come easily. It’s been a struggle to establish a studio practice, and harder still to silence the critical voice that often meets me there. That voice, persistent and overwhelming, has held me back for years. But with time and care, I’ve begun to hear another voice: one that is brave, strong, and true. It’s the voice of my younger self, the child who once sat on these same yellowwood benches, fearless with her paintbrush, certain in her joy. Conception is a collaboration, a quiet reclaiming.
I combine layered ink washes, meticulous pen work, and reimagined photographic images from my personal archive. Beginning each piece with loose, fluid gestures, letting ink find its way, I return with pen to make detailed, repetitive marks. The process is meditative and slow, offering moments of presence and clarity. Over time, I’ve come to understand this method as both aesthetic and therapeutic, a space where I meet myself honestly.
Conception weaves themes of rites of passage: birth, youth, adolescence, motherhood, and death, as cycles that shape identity. Reflecting a journey of returning to myself, through memory, image, and mark-making. Together we recolour memory, weaving play with precision, curiosity with care.
The photographs I revisit are old but unfinished stories, recoloured, reworked, and transformed. In that transformation lies the heart of Conception: turning memory, and sometimes pain or grief, into something vivid, tactile, and new.
The exhibition offers a space to witness the tension between fear and creativity, memory and renewal, doubt and expression. It is about the quiet power of creative persistence. In recolouring the past, in transforming memory into colour, I have found ways to move forward.