Nokukhanya [Bringer of Light]

Master South African ceramic artist Nicholas Sithole was born in Mkhondo (previously called Piet Retief), Mpumalanga, in 1964. He was inspired by his maternal grandmother, working with the sculpting of clay since he was a young boy. Sithole has been working full-time with ceramics since the early 1980s, building vessels for other known potters in the Johannesburg region until he started producing work his own name in 2007 — emerging on the contemporary South African ceramics scene as a master of both form and motif. Nicholas Sithole has been quietly pioneering Zulu ceramics for decades; creating a signature repertoire of carved elements (he is one of this country’s original ceramic artists, along with Clive Sithole, to innovate the traditional ‘bull’ motif) and recognisable hand-built forms. Examples of his work are rare, as Sithole destroys pieces unless they are perfect to him, but they can be found in the Pretoria Art Museum and the Nelson Mandela Museum in Port Elizabeth, in addition to various private collections in South Africa and in the Unites States. Nicholas Sithole trained with Kenyan born ceramic artist Magdalene Odondo during her visits to Johannesburg around 2010.