Siyabonga Fani works in Woodstock, Cape Town. He has been working with clay since the late 1990s while a student at the College of Cape Town and founded his studio, Siyabonga Ceramics, in 2013. He works with terracotta forms, using traditional techniques of burnishing and smoke-firing. Fani’s work is, in part, a requiem for his father, the self- taught artist. Since his father’s death, Fani’s clay is heavier; it bears the smell of smoke, pit-fired in the alleyway outside the studio. Fani hand-coils his pieces, working intuitively, drawing forms from the bodies of trees, the rivers and the human beings who make lives from the earth. His work is animated by the joy and estrangement of the township imaginary. In it, there is the yearning for the pastoral mirage of the rural homeland and the desire to hold the land tenderly. And, with the same impulse, there is the nostalgia for the bustle and hum and dialects of the township.

In 2024, Fani exhibited with Art Formes at Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Latitudes Art Fair in Johannesburg and the prestigious Homo Faber Fair in Venice. Fani’s works can be found in public collections such as South Africa’s National Iziko Museums, and several private collections around the world namely in France, Switzerland, Germany and the United States.