Guerrilla artist pretties up Joburg's streets with patchwork 'graffiti'

Conceptual artist #FoodBabySoul (FBS) arrives for a meet-up with a booming “hello”, a tumble of silver tresses and screen-printed red hearts running the length of her sleeves.

She's easy to spot. Her art - outside of its Instagram life - is tougher to find. It's because FBS's work of reimagining scrap fabric as art, commodity and counter urban culture is entwined with the people on Joburg's periphery.

Her targets are waste pickers, roadside fruit sellers and even the onslaught of ads for penis enlargements and backstreet abortions on traffic lights and lamp posts.

"About three years ago I started using my red heart sticker to bomb penis ads and abortion clinic ads that I didn't want my 10-year-old daughter to keep seeing.

"Then I decided to redecorate spaces taken over by the ads but I didn't want to be destructive like those ads so I dressed up spaces in scrap fabric creations," says FBS.

Her creations are colourful frenzies of design, texture and storytelling. She creates recycling bags for waste pickers and seat covers for women who braai mealies over braziers, and puts bow-ties and beanies on the wooden statuettes in downtown Joburg. It's about making people seen, not leaving them in the city's shadows.

She, on the other hand, as a guerrilla artist fiercely protects her identity, leaving behind only her red heart in a speech bubble or her tags #FoodBabySoul or #ScrapImpact.

"I'm not anonymous because I want to be Banksy; it's because I put my creations on Instagram and that is a social experiment for me," she says.

It's her exploration of the obsession of self-promotion through selfies, the presentation of Utopian cyber lives curated for fickle audiences with hopelessly shrunk attention spans.

"Many of the people I work with on the streets don't own smartphones or have money for data, but they sell fresh fruits and vegetables - real sustenance. They also give life to trash when they recycle," she says.

It's partly how #FoodBabySoul became her tag: the contradiction of some eating till they have a "food baby" while others call scraps a meal. It's a tag that covers hunger, greed, gut feeling, comfort and compulsion. On social media it's craving "likes" set against the starvation of being "ghosted", "unfriended" or suffering FOMO.

FBS is an American transplant; she sees Joburg, which she's called home for the past 10 years, through fresh eyes. "I hope people start to see value in scrap and see that they can make and sell their own high-value creations from trash."

She collaborates with established print artists and fashion designers, which makes her work highly sought after. But she never sells her creations, she says, darting off into a throng of waste pickers taking a breather on a Fordsburg pavement.

Some of the men are indifferent, but she's not fussed. She hands over a recycling bag stitched into an art piece to a recycler who's accepted her gift. She gives him a few rand for "advertising" her art.

The bag may be repurposed, appropriated, sold or stolen. For #FoodBabySoul it's just another incarnation for her creation, a perfect next chapter of a story of recycling.

• This article was originally published in The Times.