Self-described “compulsive clay-worker,” Hennie Meyer is one of South Africa’s most versatile ceramic artists. His signature style exceeds allegiances to form and texture; a career-long commitment to experimentation gives rise to a body of work adept at shape-shifting. In warm earthenware and the artist’s own milky glazes, the transformation of familiar domestic objects is an everyday miracle of repetition. Meyer is a worker of repertoires. Both in his own work and in an enduring commitment to mentoring other ceramicists, the clay-worker role of the artist is also facilitatory – attentive to form and gesture. Concerned with sequences, series, the score of the individual in the collective and the delicious impossibility of repetition, the artist reminds us that a big thing is first a lot of small things in concert. Meyer reminds us that obstacles, self-imposed or otherwise, are the mothercities of invention.

Untitled and without the promise of function, the artist’s recent experimental series is a city of things to do with one’s hands. In new-skin glazes, each earthenware form is exactly 400g. This is the defining parameter – beyond it, the scope extends anywhere. Each 400g object could be two thousand raindrops, a mother’s right lung, or the brain of a newborn. In the palm of Meyer’s hand, the weight of the average human hand. This body of work emerges as a meditation on the limits of things, and the limits as a frame for invention. The material rule-set of weight, glaze and medium permits an imaginative expansion through the 400g cubic edge. Repeated and repeated, the white cube stretches into the form that rises: a re-dreamed chess set, a specimen of sorts, a curious piece of white liquorice. These artworks are a nod towards the shared material origins of all things. Granted the same starting point, each form held up on the same ceramic plinth, a materially situated equality is imaged. But equality is not sameness. There is something both pragmatic and wistful about this. Are we talking about nature or nurture?