Self-described “compulsive clay-worker”, Hennie Meyer has exhibited 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. He has been working with clay since the 1980s after graduating with a Certificate of Applied Art in Ceramics (1984) and a BEd in Arts (1989) from the University of Stellenbosch.
For nearly a decade, Meyer has experimented within a fixed material proposition: 400 grams of clay. The weight — roughly that of a teacup when a potter first learns to throw — operates as a rule-set. A measured limit that becomes a site of expansive invention. In his 2024 solo exhibition at Art Formes, this inquiry culminated in 400 individual sculptures, each formed from 400 grams of black earthenware and finished in Meyer’s signature milky white glaze. Repeated and repeated, the constraint produced unlikely forms — specimens, relics, quiet abstractions.
The artist’s new shadow works extend this investigation by shifting emphasis from object to afterimage. Conceived through the shadow each sculpture would cast, these pieces press against the wall in layered blacks and greys of various tones. What was once freestanding now slinks along the surface.
If the earlier 400g works allowed weight to rise into form, this nocturnal iteration asks instead: what is the colour of a shadow? Here, the shadow is no longer a by-product of the object but its organising principle. In this penumbral turn, the sculptural shadow takes centre stage.
