Art Formes is pleased to present our new group exhibition curated by Jean Dreyer and featuring 22 artists exploring the intimate dialogue between earth and
language. Rather than simply presenting works, the exhibition creates a conversation — between artists, the gallery space, and the shared territory where soil and text meet.

At its core are ceramic artists such as Katherine Glenday and Ben Orkin, whose vessels reveal how language can live in clay — inscribed, embedded, and embodied. Their work reflects the communal nature of ceramics: knowledge passed hand to hand, stories encoded in form, and memory preserved in material.

Other artists, including Nicholas Sithole, Madoda Fani, Ledelle Moe, and Amy Rusch, treat soil as archive. Their work excavates South Africa’s layered histories and landscapes, demonstrating that earth is not neutral but a living repository of stories — of displacement and belonging, of indigenous knowledge, of what has been buried and what persists.

This spirit of exchange runs throughout the exhibition. Maja Marx’s site-specific painting responds directly to the gallery’s architecture, while Katherine Glenday’s vessels enter into dialogue with Gerhard Marx’s Elsewhere. Across the space, works listen, answer, and co-create meaning.

Jean Dreyer’s curatorial vision guides visitors through these interconnections with subtlety and nuance, showing how soil becomes a shared language and how text — written, whispered, or shaped in clay — binds us to one another and to the earth.

Featured artists: Alistair Blair, Amy Rusch, Annegret Affolderbach, Barbara Wildenboer, Ben Orkin, Diana Vives, Douglas Gimberg, Eva Obodo, Gerhard Marx, Hanien Conradie, Hennie Meyer, J.M. Otto, Jenna Burchell, Katherine Glenday, Ledelle Moe, Madoda Fani, Maia Lehr-Sacks, Maja Marx, Michele Mathison, Nicholas Sithole, Nina Kruger, Sonja Swan.