Andile Dyalvane’s artworks are muddied landscapes, the earth worn smooth, and fissures of the hard-baked ground. It is impossible to separate the artist from the dried riverbed that is childhood carried through into adulthood. This particular body of work – born from Dyalvane’s residency at Leach Pottery in St. Ives, Cornwall (United Kingdom), during 2019 – pulls spectacularly from the natural world. This oeuvre draws on the sublime nature of the earth’s landscapes. Dyalvane takes from tradition, from the sounds in his studio, from his experiences, and from a solemn reverence for the earth and its natural forms.

Andile Dyalvane’s interaction with clay is the movement of it in relation to his own body. It begins with the rhythmic pounding of the medium into long extruded coils that the artist then wraps around his neck and shoulders. Anguine and limp, the clay is propped up by his arms and carried across the room. Dyalvane then feeds the long coil into the work as it turns on its axis, the earth rotating, building it up in layers with a speed rarely found even amongst the most adept ceramic masters. The studio, nestled on a quiet road in Woodstock, throbs with the thick air of burning imphepho leaves (the space nostalgic for Dyalvane’s birthplace) and loud mesmeric music playing from a speaker. With the smoke, sounds and ritual for company, Dyalvane coils to the lilting beat — this is his practice. Hand-coiling voluminous forms, the sweat pouring from his brow as he lumbers forwards and backwards. As he moves, by extension, so do the pieces. Long after the forms are finished, they hold the movement that made them. Dyalvane’s ceramic works act as acknowledgements of the various natural environments in which the artist has found himself during his life: both red spirited earth from his native Eastern Cape and the landscapes further afield, layering one on top of the other over time like layers of skin.