biography
john
newdigate
b. 1968
BIRTH OF A NATURALIST
fig. john newdigate, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2022)
Newdigate often works in collaboration with his partner, ceramic artist Ian Garrett, whose forms’ taut bodies house Newdigate’s rich narratives. The artist has exhibited extensively at home and abroad. His work can be found in several significant South African collections, such as the Iziko Museums of South Africa and the South African Cultural History Museum in Cape Town, as well as public and private collections the world over.
john newdigate
B.1968 (CAPE TOWN, WESTERN CAPE)
BIRTH OF A NATURALIST
John Newdigate’s work captures an ecstatic, sometimes haunted innocence. He holds the fragile wing of it to the light, revealing the stratigraphy of veins, outstaring eyes, cells of colour, the fringe of fur, and the poisoned spike. The unfolding corpus is almost biographical, a memoir which has unseated its human narrator, sights from ground level. Each object offers a small, contained account. Here is the story of the praying mantis ablaze in the preternatural floodlight and the dog in wait in the blue shadows, the story of rain over grey-whetted waves or the orange Rûens*, the story of the agapanthus, the hunched mushroom, and the dizzy moth. Here is the artist’s studio with naked, unpainted pots crouching in wait – the garden pressing against the window. Here are the memories of Newdigate’s seaside childhood: plates of fish and birds against a muscular sea, the hunting blue heron, the redwing starling. Here is a dream of a machine, whirring in an impossible landscape. Each scene implies the witness – the naturalist and dreamer recording his findings.
Newdigate’s forays into mechanical imagery fabulate futurist scenes: the works in his mechanical series are knotted with electrical rainforests rendered in uncanny hues, batteries, and a television satellite that hangs heavy like the head of an arum lily. Newdigate reveals the wilderness of the urban. Organic forms push through concrete. It is a reminder that each fallen city will be conquered by an empire of plants and populated by a kingdom of creatures. As the consummate gardener of colours, he thinks into the minuscule, for it is there, he knows, that those great epics unfold: the tragedy of the fourth extinction, the fight for food, the triumph of an unfurling flower, the glory of dragonfly wings.
“Working on a three-dimensional surface, of which half is obscured at any one time, allows for the narrative to be revealed as the viewer circles the work. This introduces time as a fourth dimension, in which imagery unfolds as static animation.”
fig. john newdigate, INDIGENOUS BIRDS (2020)
read more with our publication
Clay Formes
contemporary clay from south africa
CLAY FORMES is the first of its kind: a survey of contemporary clay from South Africa. This volume, through exquisite photography and literary essays, showcases multiple generations of living South African artists, each innovating the potentialities of clay and ceramics. This publication offers enthusiasts and collectors a glimpse into the studios of thirty important South African artists and opens a window into the complexity of each body of work, revealing the richness of both contemporary clay and ceramic tradition within South African art.
This publication has sought to reflect its subject: to be as fluid as water and as weighty as earth. All this is done in the hopes of leaving behind a fresh approach to this manifold medium, and of presenting to the world the previously unexplored richness of sculptural clay in South Africa.