clay formes
FEATURED ARTISTS FROM OUR PUBLICATION
BEN ORKIN
B.1998 (CAPE TOWN, WESTERN CAPE)
Mentored by Jane Alexander at Michaelis School of Fine Art (University of Cape Town), he graduated with a BFA in 2021 and has since had several solo exhibitions both locally and abroad. In 2022, Orkin attended the OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH’s Academy of Ceramics residency program in Linz (Austria) and a body of his work showed at Miart’s Fiera Internazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Milan…
PYDA NYARIRI
B.1991 (HARARE, ZIMBABWE)
Pyda Nyariri was born in Harare and was largely raised in the Western Cape. Coming of age in the fledgling years of South African democracy and pulling from their own sojourning personal history, Nyariri’s work is concerned with the hubbub of hybrid communities, intertwining diasporas, finding common tongues, sharing myths, and building solidarity…
MARLENE STEYN
B.1989 (CAPE TOWN, WESTERN CAPE)
Marlene Steyn is a painter, a sculptor of words and clay, and a holder of negative space. Steyn is also a mother, a resister-of-labels, and a real-life mermaid of the sea of unconscious processes. She completed a BFA at Stellenbosch University (2011), going on to obtain her Master’s in painting at the Royal College of Art in London (2014)…
NINDYA BUCKTOWAR
B.1988 (QUATRE BORNES, MAURITIUS)
Nindya Bucktowar has led a life along coastlines. She witnessed a precarious coral landscape coming undone in her Mauritian childhood and navigated the vestigial architectural limbs of Gqeberha when studying at Nelson Mandela University – eventually lecturing in the Department of Architecture at the University of KwaZulu-Natal…
alistair blair
B.1987 (CAPE TOWN, WESTERN CAPE)
Alistair Blair is an erstwhile oceanographer and ceramic artist living in Kalk Bay (Cape Town). After discovering Katherine Glenday’s studio in 2014, Blair’s clay practice was birthed and, since then, Glenday has been influential through a close and extended apprenticeship. The medium has served as a means of mapping the internal self…
SYLVESTER MQEKU
B.1987 (TLOKOENG, EASTERN CAPE)
Zanoxolo Sylvester Mqeku is a ceramic artist spearheading the potentialities of clay, sand, and metal. This self-reflexive research attempts to recuperate ancient ceramic techniques through recent Industry 4.0* fabrication technologies, allowing his medium and practice to come into resonance and dissonance against each other…
siyabonga fani
B.1981 (CAPE TOWN, WESTERN CAPE)
Siyabonga Fani has been working with clay since the late 1990s and founded his studio, Siyabonga Ceramics, in 2013, while a student at Sivuyile College (now the College of Cape Town). Fani’s work is, in part, a requiem for his father, the self-taught artist who would draw sketches of television characters and perpetually redecorate their home…
jo roets
B.1979 (CAPE TOWN, WESTERN CAPE)
Jo Roets is a sculptor, painter, and mould-maker. Her clayworks are air-dried “light relief sculptures”, catching the environment, being changed by the capricious turns of atmospheric light. The artist’s interest in the ephemeral is informed by her studies of art direction and production design…
lucinda mudge
B.1979 (KNYSNA, WESTERN CAPE)
Lucinda Mudge lives in Keurboomstrand, on the Garden Route, after many years of moving between South Africa and England. She completed her BFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art (University of Cape Town) in 2000 and since then, her work has been exhibited as far afield as the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain and has been included in several publications…
zizipho poswa
B.1979 (MTHATHA, EASTERN CAPE)
Zizipho Poswa is an award-winning artist who hand-coils clay to speak about the role of Xhosa women and traditional symbols within a contemporary landscape. Poswa studied Surface Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Shortly after graduating, she and frequent collaborator Andile Dyalvane opened their independent ceramic studio, Imiso Ceramics, in 2005 in Cape Town…
andile dyalvane
B.1978 (NGOBAZANA, EASTERN CAPE)
Andile Dyalvane was born near Qobo-Qobo in the Eastern Cape and spent his childhood embedded in traditional rural Xhosa lifeways, developing an intimate relationship with umhlaba (the land, clay, mother earth). Dyalvane obtained a National Diploma in Art and Design at Sivuyile Technical College in Gugulethu (Cape Town) as well as a National Diploma in Ceramic Design from Port Elizabeth Technikon in 2003…
jeanne hoffman
B.1978 (CAPE TOWN, WESTERN CAPE)
Jeanne Hoffman works between geographies and mediums, creating paintings, drawings, and ceramic objects which function as “temporary shelters for thoughts”. Operating on a continuum, through different mediums, Hoffman pulls her pieces from the same imaginative line, speaking with her hands in distinct dialects across a network of materials…
melissa barker
B.1969 (KLERKSDORP, NORTH WEST PROVINCE)
Melissa Barker occupies many guises. She is a ceramicist building porcelain and woodfired paper clay vessels. She is an archaeologist, with her hands in the dust, uprooting fragments. She is a generous host working in the reconstructed ancient kitchen, growing her food, using fire and clay. All these aspects fold into her work…
astrid dahl
B.1977 (EMPANGENI, KWAZULU-NATAL)
Astrid Dahl makes vessels that are, in some essential sense, about vessel-making – expressing the shapes and processes of themselves, not standing as symbolic place-holders for anything else. Predominantly composed of white earthenware, Dahl’s work pays homage to form and symmetry…
richard penn
B.1976 (JOHANNESBURG, GAUTENG)
Richard Penn, now living in Auckland (New Zealand), has produced a vast body of work spanning painting, digital printmaking, drawing, animation and sculpture. His ceramic practice emerged in recent years when an attempt to make clay plinths for his metal sculptures saw him distracted and eventually entirely consumed by the new medium…
chuma maweni
B.1976 (GQEBERHA, EASTERN CAPE)
Chuma Maweni works in Cape Town, constructing onyx-black, leather-like ceramic forms. His distinctive geometric shapes are punctured in exacting constellations. Maweni was born in the Eastern Cape where he formed clay cows on the muddy riverbanks and imbibed the geometry of the indigenous architecture of the region…
madoda fani
B.1975 (CAPE TOWN, WESTERN CAPE)
Madoda Fani grew up in Gugulethu, Cape Town, and developed a precise technique at Sivuyile College (now the College of Cape Town). Fani has acquired his practice through a receptiveness to the world, accumulating elements of style and method from an assemblage of mentors…
frances goodman
B.1975 (JOHANNESBURG, GAUTENG)
Frances Goodman is a conceptual artist who has been repurposing and transforming medium since the 1990s in order to raise questions around feminine identity – especially in relation to social norms, popular culture, and the beauty industry. She obtained a degree in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and a Master’s at Goldsmiths College in London…
lyndi sales
B.1973 (CAPE TOWN, WESTERN CAPE)
Lyndi Sales creates bustling, bursting, spiralling objects. Working primarily with hand-cut perspex, paper and fabric, Sales constructs sculptural installations and intricate collages, frequently drawing inspiration from microscopic or macroscopic scientific data. Sales’ 2021 experiments with clay signal an extension within her material universe…
ruan hoffmann
B.1971 (PRETORIA, GAUTENG)
A medium-defining artist, Ruan Hoffmann has been expressing himself through clay for three decades, moving without apology between the personal and the political. While he now lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, he was born in South Africa and came of age in a time of great sociopolitical upheaval, beginning his studies in Art at the University of Pretoria in the 1990s…
ledelle moe
B.1971 (DURBAN, KWAZULU-NATAL)
Ledelle Moe uses earth and concrete to explore the porousness of bodies, monuments, and belonging – in ancient, industrial and human-scale timelines. Moe mixes the earth from the locations where she might be working into the concrete to build figures, collections of heads and monumental anthropomorphic frames…
ian garrett
B.1971 (MOLTENO, EASTERN CAPE)
Creating a new body of work is a lengthy creative process for master ceramicist Ian Garrett, who hand-builds to near perfection. Born in the Eastern Cape, Garrett has been building vessels in clay since his early childhood. His first studio was a self-built hut in the garden…
clive sithole
B.1971 (SOWETO, GAUTENG)
Clive Sithole was born on the vibrant outskirts of Johannesburg, and has since traversed far and wide, learning from Zulu and Venda ceramic artists in South Africa, studying the Udu ceramic drum in Nigeria, and working with Magdalene Odundo at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, England…
jabulile nala
B.1969 (ESHOWE, KWAZULU-NATAL)
Jabulile Nala bears the memory of a line of female ceramicists. Born in KwaZulu-Natal, and rooted in the ceramic traditions of her mother, Nesta, and her grandmother, Siphiwe, Nala creates sculptural forms which spiral wildly from their origin point in the Zulu clay heritage, at once incorporating and defying traditions…
john newdigate
B.1968 (CAPE TOWN, WESTERN CAPE)
John Newdigate creates the colours you remember, distantly, from your childhood: the deep acrid red, the ripening blue, the warm, aching green, the edible yellow. There are also the scenes you witnessed, lying on your stomach, watching the dramas of insects unfold, the houses sunken into the riverbank, the birds curled in the reeds…
belinda blignaut
B.1968 (OYSTER BAY, EASTERN CAPE)
Interdisciplinary artist Belinda Blignaut is committed to wild, hand-dug clay, and its capacity to transform embodied experience. The artist describes this deep connection to the mud as a kind of homecoming – “an ongoing deepening love rather than a making- from-scratch.” Blignaut stages the primordial story of the creature emerging from clay…
hennie meyer
B.1965 (CAPE TOWN, WESTERN CAPE)
Self-described “compulsive clay-worker”, Hennie Meyer has ex- hibited prolifically around the world and is one of South Africa’s most experimental and influential ceramic artists. He spent his childhood years in KwaZulu-Natal and has trained both in Australia and South Africa, developing a practice of warm earthenware and new-skin glazes…
katherine glenday
B.1960 (CAPE TOWN, WESTERN CAPE)
Katherine Glenday lives and works in her Kalk Bay studio (Cape Town) and exhibits all around the world. The material, imaginary, and interpersonal resonances of porcelain have remained central to Glenday’s practice since the early 1980s. Formally and conceptually emphasising the porousness of borders and skins, the artist’s vessels defy categorisation…
catherine brennon
B.1956 (QONCE, EASTERN CAPE)
Catherine Brennon’s life has been cast from landscape to landscape – from the bustling city of Johannesburg to the quiet town of Harpenden in England, to the wide open hills of the Underberg region and the high sea winds of Hermanus. In 1979, she com- pleted a National Diploma in Ceramics and, in 2003, earned a BTech Ceramics degree from the Technikon Witwatersrand in Johannesburg…
hylton nel
B.1941 (N’KANA, ZAMBIA)
Small towns and cities are the constellation points scattered through the life and career of self-described “artist-potter” Hylton Nel. He first felt the cold press of clay beneath his palm in Kimberly where he went to school, and in Makhanda, while studying Fine Arts at Rhodes University, his experiments grew in ambition and scale…
CLAY FORMES
AN ART FORMES PUBLICATION
This volume explores the studios of thirty contemporary South African artists, through exquisite photography and rich literary essays, pushing the bounds of clay as art form.
CLAY FORMES was published in August 2023. The first book of its kind, bringing light to the medium of clay within contemporary South African art.