Widely acknowledged as one of South Africa’s master ceramic artists, Ian Garrett nurtures an obsession for neat lines and perfect curves. He meticulously coils forms from clay, often into magnitude, that stand almost numinous in their near-perfection. “Very often, the lines that I am putting onto the surface will echo the shape,” says the artist, “the profile of the piece echoes throughout the piece itself.” The line is intrinsic to Garrett’s practice: regardless of its variation in curve, each line exists in relation to another. The compositions are reminiscent of flattened landscapes, as seen from above: the agricultural tones of border lines, natural contours and cartographic planes. Again, we see Garrett’s devotion to precision: the perfect borders of the burnished sections, drawn as if with a sharp-tipped tool rather than a smooth agate pebble. Garrett builds monumental forms from mud and draws sharp contours with stone.

The soft-spoken and often burnished echoes in Garrett’s work recall ceramic traditions from extinct cultures and forgotten kingdoms in history. Since childhood, the artist has been drawn to excavated artefacts and to ancient mark-making, impressions left on the surface of the clay by earlier peoples like the ancient impressions of shells that exist only in fossilised rock. The thin lines on Garrett’s vessels whisper back to the cord-motifs of neolithic British pottery, namely ‘Beaker Culture’ wares in Northwest Europe from the third millennium BC. In his work, we glimpse the archaic profiles and semi-spherical motifs of the old Cucuteni–Trypillian culture, sprawling across much of Eastern Europe almost seven thousand years ago. Garrett reveals: “I wanted to make my own versions of ancient things. I have always loved the beautifully burnished Bronze Age pottery of ancient Cyprus, and I have a soft spot for the hand-built, peat-fired ‘craggans’ from the Hebridean island of Lewis that were made right up until WWI.”