Design Miami 2024

The work on show considers ceramics’ ancient origins while showcasing progressive approaches to form, technique, symbolism and utility. The gallery will present furniture, sculpture and vessels by leading ceramic artists, including Belinda Blignaut, Andile Dyalvane, Madoda Fani, Ian Garrett, Katherine Glenday, King Houndekpinkou, Michal Korycki, Justine Mahoney, Chuma Maweni, Jabulile Nala, Ben Orkin and Zizipho Poswa. Additional works by Rich Mnisi, Jesse Ede and Ange Dakouo will also be on show.

The medium of ceramics occupies a unique position across the continent, being among the most enduring and relevant forms of material culture in Africa. Ceramic objects reveal evolutions in technology, belief systems, ritual, aesthetics and domestic life, helping us to understand shifts in geography, history, politics and society. Across Africa in particular, it offers a tangible link to pre-colonial culture and its underrepresented narratives. “It is not by chance that brown, diasporic and indigenous artists are connecting to this material. It’s because that connects us to something deeper in ourselves and of our own histories,” Pablo José Ramírez, curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, has said. “The emergence of ceramics in contemporary art responds to the necessity of bringing these stories to the forefront.”

Since its founding in 2008, Southern Guild has been at the forefront of the category’s evolution, working closely with artists to explore the breadth of expressive and functional possibilities. Artists Zizipho Poswa, Andile Dyalvane, Madoda Fani and Chuma Maweni have risen to international prominence with collections of work inspired by their Xhosa heritage, now placed in the collections of major museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA, Art Institute of Chicago and Vitra Design Museum. The gallery presented their work in a specially curated exhibition, Studio Visit, at Design Miami in 2021, which won Best Gallery award at the fair.

With its profound connection to land, ecology and humankind’s origins, clay is an energetic and ancestral lifeline for the artists in Southern Guild’s exhibition. King Houndekpinkou – whose ritualistic vessels use clay sourced from Paris, Benin and Japan – describes it as “the oldest, most profound encyclopaedia”. The medium is a materialisation of his animist beliefs and syncretic worldview, which blends Japanese Shintoism and Beninese Voudou. “It has absorbed all the knowledge of the world and from humanity. Each vibration through time. Everything that has happened, each conversation is encapsulated in clay. It’s the ideal source to search for answers for who I am,” he notes.

For Dyalvane, clay is an indelible portal to a spiritual realm. His iNtwaso series of sculptures made especially for the fair in collaboration with his wife, Nkuthazo Alexis Dyalvane, are adorned with embellishments of cow hair, grass and leather evoking the ‘umngqi’ ritual adornments worn by Xhosa spiritual healers as symbols of purification. Each of the three works represent a stage in the path of awakening, learning and initiation that the ‘igqirha’ (healer) must go through in their search for wisdom.

Though distinct in technique, clay type and finished form, the work of Katherine Glenday and Belinda Blignaut both respond to the schisms in society and consciousness. Concentrating on porcelain, Glenday uses the vessel form as an iconic and ubiquitous language, exaggerating the joins and seams to invoke the fragility of our constructed world. Empathic and contemplative, her practice searches for what exists in the “between-ness” of things. “Communion with one another and the earth is the sounding bell that calls,” she says.

Digging her own wild clay from riverbeds and using plant ash as glaze, Blignaut seeks complex surfaces, unpredictable texture and error; her use of unprocessed materials and inclusion of organic matter such as snake skins, shells, plant matter and rocks allowing for chance events and natural reactions in the kiln. At times, these unknowns can cause small explosions, melting or breaking of the objects, the remnants of which are often cut and joined to make ‘an other’ whole.

The lineage of traditional ceramics from Southern Africa is clearly discernible in the work of Jabulile Nala, Madoda Fani and Chuma Maweni. Nala, daughter of the late master potter Nesta Nala and an acclaimed artist in her own right, contributes multiple iconic beer pots to the booth. Her dark, smoke-fired vessels are embellished with the geometric motifs, studded patterns and delicate incisions that have defined traditional Zulu ceramics for generations. Having learned traditional techniques from South Africa’s master potters, Fani has evolved an entirely original approach, combining a robust sense of form with delicate scale-like carving. His hand-coiled sculptures at Design Miami are part of a major new body of work that deconstructs reductive and harmful cliches of Black masculinity, re-fashioning them with masterful skill and attention to craft. Maweni debuts a tiled ceramic table from his iMvelaphi collection showing concurrently at Southern Guild Cape Town. A master of wheel-thrown ceramics, he creates large-scale furniture defined by precision and balance, their dark silhouettes articulated by crisp ridges and bands of carved patterns.

Ian Garrett’s artistic journey is a testament to his lifelong fascination with the age-old craft of hand-building, burnishing and pit-firing ceramics. Informed by a deep knowledge of archaic traditions, Garrett's nuanced, hybrid vessels appear both timeless and strikingly contemporary. His curvilinear surface designs contrast glossy burnished areas against matt-textured motifs, suggesting fingerprints or magnetic force-fields that appear to make visible hidden energies within the clay fabric.

The anthropomorphism that is intrinsic to this age-old craft form echoes throughout the vocabulary of forms on show at Design Miami. Justine Mahoney’s painted earthenware figures employ a narrative approach, embodying and mythologising facets of the collective human unconscious. The presented works depict Jungian archetypes of the heroine and the magician as hybridised apparitions emerging from the duality of our inner worlds. By contrast, Ben Orkin explores queer intimacy using abstract forms that suggest reciprocity with the human body. Oscillating between moments of nourishment and dependency, validation and resistance, love and separation, his sculptural totems delve into the relationship between pushing away and pulling closer.

Michal Korycki’s Complex Torso series investigates the human pursuit of assemblage, relating the act of gathering and constructing a cohesive object, building or space to one’s own body. An architect, he invites viewers to decode and unravel the intricate components that form the entirety. Korycki utilises cut slabs and blocks instead of moulding vessels or using a wheel. Clay, as a material, presents both malleability and sensitivity, shrinking and drying when exposed to air. Korycki embraces these inherent characteristics, emphasising the material’s self-correction and response to kiln firing.

Exhibiting works from various series, including an edition of a ceramic lamp first made for Loewe, Zizipho Poswa builds volumetric sculptures that call to mind the act of carrying (objects balanced atop the head) or wearing (hairstyles, crowns or jewellery). Her practice pays intimate homage to the women within her extended community: the mothers, sisters, providers, healers and caretakers who are custodians of Xhosa ritual and custom. The work titled uMolokazana waseMazizini honours the process of passing on the knowledge of running a household from ‘umamazala’ (the mother-in-law) to ‘umolokazana’ (the bride-to-be), whereby the bride spends a week or more at her in-laws’ house being taught how to take care of her new home.

Displayed in individual groups according to artist, Southern Guild’s presentation is intended to showcase the breadth of approach and style coming out of the continent today. The exhibition seeks to expand the medium’s applications, while honouring its deep roots as a life-sustaining vehicle of expression.