Diana Hyslop lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. In her mid twenties Hyslop worked for Marvel Comics in London. In the late eighties she studied painting at Bill Ainslie’s Johannesburg Art Foundation. In the nineties she spent a year at the Santa Monica Fine Arts Studios in California. In 1998 Hyslop committed to full time painting. In 2002 she joined the Fordsburg Artists’ Studios (Bag Factory Artists’ Studios) as a permanent tenant artist and has been part of this downtown collective for nine years. Largely informed by comics and film, Hyslop’s work explores magical realism and a universe of possibilities in which unexpected combinations are viable, all co-exist, and where everything can happen at once. She is interested in the duality of existence, a solitary/social phenomenon through which an eminent encounter can sometimes determine our pathways and go beyond it.