Juanita Frier was born in Tzaneen in 1973. She is passionate about tackling issues such as consumerism in her artworks and how it has affected the arts. Her artworks engaged with the idea that the acquisition or ownership of goods is a reflection of status and self-identity. She explores this idea in a variety of ways, usually featuring consumable goods, sites of consumption, the acquisition of goods, or advertising imagery in her artwork.

Frier believes that society has gone mad and her artworks make statements about how we get bombarded by bad news and huge advertising billboards selling us stuff that we don’t need. Frier feels that people have been divided and controlled by corporate forces for too long now already. In her artworks Frier can be seen using imagery and articles from magazines creating disfigured figures that in turn comment on societies loss of identity or lack thereof. “Life is not a race, life is not a competition, I believe that art inspires and I believe that if enough people get inspired, the world will change. Life is the masterpiece that we are all working on.

The process of making art is a way to share ourselves with others” she says. Her current artworks focus on freedom, and unity of people; she uses humour in a lot of the artworks as a tool to break barriers between different people. The work is made to uplift the viewer and hopefully also to share a sense of freedom. The style is mixed media, and acrylic, as well as paper mache sculpture and mosaic.