Art Formes presents Imprint, a group exhibition featuring a quartet of artists dedicated to the remnant traces of clay — with each artist’s practice uniquely positioned in a relationship between imprint and earth. Art Formes explores clay through the perspective of memory. These concepts are explored with the cloth works, or mud letters, of interdisciplinary artist Belinda Blignaut, who uses a vast archive of earth and its residues to speak of embodied forms of survival and healing; the clay drawings and sculptures of artist Johan Thom, who investigates gestural movements and moments through the traces left behind by and in clay. Additionally, the exhibition presents sculptural ceramic works by artist Ludwe Mgolombane, who uses stoneware with integrated plant matter and metals to construct figural forms whose surfaces are marked through combustion and the artist’s tools; and the terracotta sculptures of Congolese ceramic artist Okitosongo Kadima Junior, whose emotive figurative groups tenderly touch on themes of migration, identity and memory.
Human beings have reached for clay to give flesh to their dreams or to extend the body – the most rudimentary gestures of world-making begin with a fistful of clay. We have constructed shelter, vessels for food and water, made idols, art objects, vases, currencies, talismans, funerary urns, and inscribed laws and myths upon clay surfaces. In turn, human history has been imprinted in the archive of clay. We can read the long-decomposed body in the artefacts clay has left behind, in their absences – here the cavern left by a palm, there a crescent scored by a nail. We can feel the remnants of the potter’s movements: the depth and angle of the gestures which moved the clay before it was frozen by fire or sun. Clay bears the memory of the earth itself: the impressions of fossils, the spiral ammonites and the spines of extinct creatures. But beyond this great capacity to remember is the ability of clay to change, to lumber towards the future, yielding under force.
Johan Thom explores both of these themes – in his installation, the act of grasping becomes a metaphor for that which remains unknown or undiscovered, suggesting that the tactile and material remain largely dormant, fecund repositories for rethinking our partial knowledge of the world. His clay drawings represent the remnants of his material – serving to extend the force and presence of the body onto the surface of the paper. Belinda Blignaut’s interdisciplinary cloth works contain marks of the making of her vessels, as well as lines from notes she writes during the process, or from being in the landscapes she gathered materials from. The result is a rich documentation of her artistic practice, often spanning several years. Ludwe Mgolombane’s experiments with the impressionable nature of clay – exploiting at once its fragility and strength. By working combustible materials into the raw body that burn away in the firing, the surface is altered uncontrollably, ripped apart – the clay bearing the memory of space once held, fleetingly. Okitosongo Kadima Junior’s terracotta is heavy with the memory of a fractured past. Emigrating from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, his haunting figural abstractions recall the faces of those now only in his memory – a tormented past forever etched into this earthly flesh.
This ability for clay to hold and relay a manifold of narratives is due in part to the impressionable nature of the raw material. The act of impression has always been intrinsic to clay works, from a simple maker’s mark to the intricate motifs applied to the traditional ukhamba. However, the commonality between the work in this exhibition is found not only in the exploration of the physical act of impression, but also the conceptual weight of clay and its remnants.
Johan Thom
Johan Thom, born in Johannesburg, South Africa, works across a variety of media including sculpture, video, performance, drawing, printmaking and photography. From a narrower focus on the body in his earlier work, Thom’s interest has gradually shifted to an exploration of the performative relationship between the body, materials and found objects — working extensively with a broad range of objects and materials such as wood, polyurethane foam, clay, plaster, chalk, blackboard paint and many others – often generating messy, corporeal visual forms that extend, question and animate the various forces at stake in our changing, material relationship to the surrounding world. Thom completed a PhD in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL) on a Commonwealth Scholarship in 2014. He is an Ampersand Fellow (NY) and has attended residencies in Bangladesh (Britto Arts Trust), Mexico (Casa Wabi), Switzerland (Pro Helvetia), South Africa (Nirox Foundation 2007 & 2014) and elsewhere. Solo exhibitions by Thom include Nirox Foundation (2024/5), Kalashnikovv Gallery (2023), The Goodman Gallery (2015), Nirox Project space (2014), Iwalewa Haus (2010), the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2008) and the Bag Factory (2008), amongst others. His works have also been included in group exhibitions at the Venice Biennale (2003), the Canary Islands Biennale (2006), and at the Palazzo delle Papesse (2008). He recently completed a residency at Nirox Foundation, resulting in an ambitious installation of 990 clay shapes. Thom is based in Pretoria and is an Associate Professor of Fine Art in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Pretoria.
Okitsongo Junior
Okitosongo Kadima Junior is a ceramic artist born in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. After completing his studies, with a specialisation in Sculpture, at the well- known Académie des Beaux-Arts (ABA) in Kinshasa, Junior emigrated to South Africa – where he has been working in various ceramic studios and in collaboration with other ceramic artists. Over the years, Junior has been earnestly honing his artistic practice, mastering his technique of hand-building and sculpting, which has been largely inspired by historical sculpture from the Renaissance period, art history, diverse indigenous ceramic traditions and biblical, mythological themes – all of which are integrated, re-interpreted and transformed into work that is specifically his own, anchored in questions around memory and African identity.
Belinda Blignaut
Interdisciplinary artist Belinda Blignaut was born in Gibson Bay, Eastern Cape, South Africa, is committed to wild, hand-dug clay, and its capacity to transform embodied experience. The artist describes this deep connection to the mud as a kind of homecoming – “an ongoing deepening love rather than a making-from-scratch.” Blignaut stages the primordial story of the creature emerging from clay. She has been making work since the late 1980s, emerging as an experimental concept-driven artist on the Johannesburg scene, exhibiting further afield at the 1994 São Paulo and 1995 Africus Johannesburg Biennales. In 2019, Blignaut performed her piece Working From The Inside in Vienna alongside artists such as Marina Abramovich and Betty Tompkins. After years of experimentation with medium and body, Blignaut has found herself within the mud. She has become legendary in South Africa for her pioneering practice: forging a new impulse in contemporary ceramics, that of unprocessed wild clay.
Ludwe Mgolombane
Ludwe Mgolombane is a ceramic artist born in Umtata, Eastern Cape, South Africa. Primarily focused on sculpting the human form in the setting of his memories of home. He studied Ceramic Design at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University — a steady body of work has grown and honed the narrative of his sculptural views. In previous works that have won him awards, his gaze has been contemplative of transitional experiences in the practice of amaXhosa traditions. In 2018, his first solo exhibition titled ‘The Scramble Continues’ hosted by Gallery Noko saw defined abstractions of semi-rural into township bustling life. He appeared in the RMB Turbine Art Fair, Johannesburg in 2019 and was the recipient of the 2020 Lithuba Lakho ‘This is Your Chance’ award in the Eastern Cape Art Competition. In 2022, he received the Ceramics South Africa’s 3rd merit national award within the ‘New Signatures’ category. His process includes mixing clay with any organic combustible materials, such as leaves, straw and pine needles that burn away, leaving a grassy, gritty textural finish highlighted using oxides. Now residing in Cape Town, Mgolombane had his second solo exhibition in November 2023. 2024 brought an opportunity to widen Ludwe’s artistic horizon, attending the multimedia Haystack Open Studio Residency, in Maine, USA, where he got to explore various disciplines: print on ceramics, wood carving and his family tradition of rope making. After much introspection, the artist managed to bend his own habits and is currently working on a series of abstract figures in preparation for his next solo show. He is currently a resident artist at Imiso Ceramics with Andile Dyalvane and Zizipho Poswa.
