Art @ Work Today

Read more about author Ronnie Watt’s recent Taiwan trip to give a presentation on Rorke’s Drift at the Taipei Ceramics Biennale and Conference here.

A pot will exist merely as a pot when when all the attention is focussed on its actual and purported aesthetics and when its text is presented as abbreviated footnotes of its own and of its social history. Artifacts, wrote the sociologist Emile Durkheim, are social facts (3) and by glossing over a pot’s (and its potter’s) positioning in social history, we reduce it to a thing and deny it a thingness.

The opposite also holds true that when a pot is so romanticised in context of its social history, the pot qua pot becomes but the metatext to the social anthropological, material culture, archaeological, socio-political and art historical texts. We neglect to look at the pot as a thing in its very own right and as the very locus of the entanglement of man and material.

The pot is also prejudiced when it is reduced to nothing but a named pot where the mere name of the artist or craftsman or studio, or its association with a style or era or culture, is what makes it a collectable. As a cabinet object, such a pot invites the viewer to attribute a disassociated meaning to it rather than directing the viewer towards an understanding of it.

Take the example of an actual metatext for a pot in a current (2014) online catalogue of one of South Africa’s premier public ceramic collections:

• Eureil Mbatha
  Reduced stoneware
  Height: 180mm Width:156mm

The inclusion of the pot in the collection denotes that it has significant merit but only the informed viewer who recognises the potter’s name (despite being misspelled) or the style and form, would be able to position it in context of the production of pots in traditional form but with a new artistic expression under European influence at the time of a tumultuous socio-political era in South Africa. The pot is in fact the work of Euriel Mbatha, one of the founding women handbuilders of pots at the Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift. Such omission of highly relevant autobiographical details of both potter and pot are regularly to be seen in the texts of fine art auctions’ lot listings and dealers’ advertisements of Rorke’s Drift pottery.

But does all of this actually matter? Does it not suffice that at the very least we recognise and celebrate a potter or a pot? My view is that along the way we are progressively losing focus on Rorke’s Drift pottery as “things with thingness” and that the “thing” rather than its “thingness” determines its collectability (and economic value). This essay has its specific focus on the reduction-fired handbuilt pots by the founding women of the workshop and I am therefore addressing their artistic heritage and works.

In her master’s thesis Tradition and innovation: Rorke’s Drift ceramics in the collection of the Durban Art Gallery, KwaZulu-Natal, Sarah Hosking (4) provides a detailed account of the history of the founding of the Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift (hereafter referred to as Rorke’s Drift) which I will summarise. The project was initiated in the early 1960s by the Swedish artist Bertha Hansson and Helge Fosseus, head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the South-East Region of South Africa. Fosseus envisaged self-help craft groups to assist Africans and successfully canvassed support in Sweden which enable him and Hansson to recruit teaching staff. Ulla and Peder Gowenius, the former specialising in textile art and weaving and the latter who was qualified in printmaking, sculpture and art education were contracted. The Gowenius’s were initially based at the Ceza Mission Hospital at Mapumulo in the KwaZulu-Natal Province where the teachers engaged female patients in sewing and weaving and the male patients in handcrafts, drawing, painting and printing. Starting in 1963 and over time, four workshops would be set up at Oskaersberg, site of the earlier Swedish mission station at Rorke’s Drift near Dundee, for weaving, sewing, printmaking and ceramics and which was known as the Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre. The ceramics workshop was created in 1968 though Hosking recounts that the earliest venture into ceramic production was in 1964 when the potter Kerstin Olsson copied the open-fired technique of a local woman potter and progressed to a wood-fired kiln which collapsed after just a few firings.

The history of the establishment and growth of the pottery workshop were documented by Garth Clark & Lynne Wagner, Ian Calder, Calder & Berit Sahlström (5-8) and Hosking of which a further summary must suffice. Clark & Wagner (9) identified the Danish potter Peter Tyberg with the founding of the pottery workshop in 1968. Dinah Molefe, a local potter from the neighbouring area of Nqutu (10) who was producing indigenous izinkamba (beer pots) in the Zulu tradition of coiling (handbuilding), was recruited to join the workshop and were later joined by Ivy Molefe; Lephinah Molefe and Nestah Molefe (11). local men of whom Gordon Mbatha was the first (12) were also recruited but were taught to throw on the wheel. The two other men were Joel Sibisi and Ephraim Ziqubu (13). The project was beset by problems with a poor drip-feed oil kiln, unstable local clay and a low output of unglazed stoneware, issues which were resolved by the South African potter Marietjie van der Merwe who became a regular visitor and advisor until her death in 1992. She designed and supervised the building of a 4,247m3 paraffin-fired kiln and introduced a neutral kaolin glaze to enhance the black, iron, yellow ochre and umber slips for surface decorations (14). She probably influenced the women to fully glaze their work (15). Electric kilns were introduced in 2000 (16).

Rorke’s Drift pottery found immediate appeal when it went on exhibition alongside the centre’s weavings at an exhibition at the Durban Art Gallery in 1968 and two years later the gallery acquired handbuilt and thrown works for the gallery’s permanent collection (17). The significance of this is that the works were the first by black South African artists to be acquired for inclusion in a public collection during the apartheid era (18), a time during which, wrote Liza van Robbroeck, black artists were consistently marginalised, excluded from education and exhibition opportunities, denied representation in national art collections and had their works reduced to curiosities (19).

Using “the materials and technical facilities of contemporary western arts”, the pottery workshop’s mission was to “nurture the unique artistic heritage of Africa”, “to train the studio potters for a professional career, with the emphasis on well-crafted wares” and offer the works for sale via outlets” (20-22).

Emily Hanna, Curator of the Arts of Africa and the Americas at the Birmingham Museum of Art, speaks of “The Centrality of Ceramics in African Cultures” in referring to their “prominence … in traditional daily life and ritual … [the] indigenous systems of value and connoisseurship … [and] the African engagement with clay and aesthetic continuities between materials” (23). The latter part of the quote surely refers to indigenous knowledge systems of materials (clay) for the production of material culture (pots) which though utilitarian in purpose (cooking, brewing, storage, carrying), are cultural expressions as well as the potter’s self-expression.

The majority of the Rorke’s Drift women handbuilders belonged to the Sotho group and were skilled in producing pots in the traditional Sotho form such as mirifi for brewing and pitsa for cooking as well as Zulu forms of domestic pots (umsamo) and in particular the ukhamba (plural izikhamba) for the low-alcohol beer (utshwala). The Sotho tradition, explains Mathodi Freddie Motsamayi, is the making of pots by women using the coiling technique with decorations in red terracotta colours (Calder refers to bright-red ochre slips with a unique style of thickened lip (24-29). In Zulu pottery tradition, pots are decorated in brown and black colours which are burnished at the leather-hard stage, fired a second time to produce a glossy black surface and then polished with cow fat or waxes (30-31). Both cultures added decorative elements which could be as applied motifs or incised into the surface (sgraffito) or a combination of both. Zulu motifs included raised bumps (amasumpa), pinched surfaces and geometric designs of hatched and cross-hatched lines and grooves, zigzags and triangles which are borrowed from designs and repeat patterns on traditional Zulu mats (isithebe), Zulu basketry and beadwork and raised linear coils (32-36).

Distinctive indigenous form and designs were preserved in the women’s pots at Rorke’s Drift even with the addition of non-traditional features and sculptural appendages. Elizabeth Perrill (37) states that Indigenous Knowledge Systems of materials, methods, forms and values are not monolithic and permit an expansion of innovative aesthetics within and as a continuation of a culture. This permitted the women to create in their own image, forms that were more western in concept such as bowls and vases (uvazi) (38), the bird-pots which were probably modelled on 19th century European hen-on-nest forms (39) and transforming vessel shapes into purely sculptural forms (40-41). Clark & Wagner commented on the first impression of “sameness of shape and decoration” (42) even though the potters worked as independent artists. Though “independent” the women remained “a collective representation of several social and cultural groups” (43) and for the most part stayed within the parameters of traditional Sotho and Zulu forms.

The decorative features ranged from a treatment of the clay body itself to painting in layers of slips, (44) the latter which Hosking emphasises as a departure from indigenous tradition (45) and which generally covered most of the surface but were “sympathetic to the underlying form of the piece”. She refers to abstract, repeated motifs and decorative patterns of zigzags, triangles, semicircles and squares (46) which follow the form of the pot and accentuate structural elements (47). Calder speaks of “biomorphic cartouches” (48) that formed individual motifs and were created by first painting a coloured slip onto the unfired surface and then incising into the coloured ground with a sgraffito tool, or the process in reverse (49).

Raised elements on the surface ranged from corded designs of shields, arcs and rings to the amasumpa arranged in geometric patterns by adding the nodules on the surface of the vessel or by criss-crossing grooves on a flattened panel or forming them from the inside of the pot by using a matchstick to push the inner surface outwards (50-52). Indented designs included longitudinal lines of stitch-like incisions and zigzagged lines of hollows (53-54). V-shapes and zigzags are probably intended to represent cattle (55). The triangle with the apex pointing up denoted an unmarried woman and with the apex down referred to an unmarried man and linked together either in an hourglass shape or a diamond would represent the joining of a man and woman (56). Hosking makes mention of the often contrasting areas of light and dark, of texture and smoothness (57).

The figurative elements, says Hosking, are generally linear with simplified features and are stacked onto the spherical form (58). Traditional pot forms were transformed into novel vesseled figures, even imagined species of animals or based on nature or Zulu myth and legend (59). Knobbed handles were introduced. Some pots repeated the multiple neck pot forms (ingcazi) known in Zulu culture (60). Hosking describes the women’s works in the period after 1984 to have become more intricate and with greater preference for composite works featuring richer painted and textural decorations (61).

Though there was a strict gender division of labour in the workshop (the women creating handbuilt pots and the men throwing pots and also fetching the clay, mixing the slips and glazes, packing and firing the kiln) (62), there was a cross-influence of creativity as is evident in the women copying the men in adding handles and turning of foot-rings (63).

Calder listed nine women working as potters: Euriel Damman (nee Mbatha), Miriam Khumalo, Elizabeth Mbatha, Judith Mkhabela, Dina Molefe, Ivy Molefe, Lephinah Molefe, Nestah Molefe and Florence Sibisi (64). Justin Kerrod ads the name of Loviniah Molefe (65) but this could be a corrupted form of Lephinah Molefe.