"People keep asking me where I have been, am I South African?" says Turiya Magadlela,who is this year's winner of the FNB Art Prize. As a retiring person she's slightly unnerved by the attention the award has generated, but also wants her work to be recognised. It's the age-old paradox that plagues artists.Magadlela is indeed South African; Soweto-born and raised, but has more or less gone under the radar since returning from the Netherlands in the mid-noughties, where she furthered her fine arts education at the famous Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. She was accepted into the institution with a conceptual work in which she stretched blue workers' overalls over square frames.She said: "There's such stigma attached to these garments. Black people are so hung up on what they wear, they judge each other by it. I wanted to show that there is some dignity in these clothes."Her art has remained centred on transforming fabrics with loaded histories into canvases.Magadlela has worked with diverse materials from pantihose, prison uniforms, sheets, to the uncomfortably titled "k*ffir-sheeting". She's interested in the sociopolitical baggage attached to these textiles and has titled works with the names of prominent figures who have been incarcerated.But she gravitates towards fabrics that hold personal significance. While in the Netherlands, she took a disused prison uniform worn by a friend while he was incarcerated and transformed it into a series of little canvases. It was an expression of her separation from this friend, but also evoked her uncertain status in that country, which left her feeling "imprisoned".Magadlela associates pantyhose with her failed attempts to be a ballerina and all the imposed definitions of femininity that idea entailed. She reinvents the stockings and when viewed from afar the abstract composition and patterns that hold your attention.She says: "I don't want to dictate to the viewer what to think. Everyone has completely different perceptions about these fabrics."Not everyone thinks of ballet when they look at a stocking, like I do."Magadlela's work has been dubbed abstract and it is only now that a wider movement towards abstraction has been taking hold. This is probably why Magadlela's art had been overlooked before and she wasn't snapped up by any of the major art galleries. She refused to change her mode, though she admits to being an adept figurative painter. Refusing to compromise artistic values for commercial success is an ideal she learnt from her father, the painter Fikile Patrick Magadlela.A solo exhibition of her work which was held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery earlier this year signalled that Magadlela was on her way up, but it is the FNB Art Prize, which comes with a R100 000 prize and a stand dedicated to her art at the Johannesburg Art Fair, that will shift her status, not only locally, but internationally.Magadlela will show her work at the FNB Johannesburg Art Fair from September 11 to 13 at the Sandton Convention Centre..