Nyariri’s work insists upon remaining an open text; it is a question or invitation or starting point. In this way, the work mirrors the muse, pidgin languages. A pidgin is a form of survival in the byways of empire; it is a joyful, resistant response to the suffocation of indigenous languages or the ramshackle assemblages made by trade and labour.
The brilliance of Nel’s work is in its materiality. Naturally, it is the surfaces of his pieces that are immediately recognisable – rooted as they are in literature, history, mythology, eroticism and memoir
How do you write separately about two artists who have been together for over twenty years and whose studios fall under the same roof? John Newdigate and Ian Garrett cut the reeds themselves from the river by their home in Swellendam to make the large ceiling that covers both studios.
The invitation of Hoffman’s work is to chase the tail of the forms’ suggestions, to allow the imagination to rush into the object, to see a snake in a coil of clay or an elephant’s tusk in a spire, and so on.
Buckotwar’s use of space and clay allows us to question various kinds of material relatedness. We wonder, among much else – what happens when clay is used to evoke things under the sea?
Art form(e)s that moved us from this year’s Investec Cape Town Art Fair (ICTAF): Ledelle Moe, Frances van Hasselt, Bronwyn Katz & Gabrielle Kruger…
The beauty of Adams’ work is that it exists in two scales: micro and macro. It is both cosmic universe and tiny seashell. It can be experienced in textured minutiae or in its calming entirety.
Lucinda Mudge is equal parts artist and storyteller. Each artwork can take up to three months before completion. This means that Mudge works multiple vessels at the same time – or rather, Mudge tells multiple stories at the same time.
The forms are rendered tenderly, as if familiar, with the simultaneous freshness of a first attempt — seeing what happens when one makes a disembodied foot that both references ancient classical sculpture, and is like the first foot in the history of everything.
These porcelain pieces were carried down to the motionless Antarctic seabed, where they remain. And we can imagine that eventually they will disintegrate, and that new forams will find them and glue them into new shells, and that the porcelain-making circle will complete itself.
© Art Formes 2021