The Clay Museum

The museum contains an exclusive, mainly contemporary collection of South African ceramics that represents the various techniques of making, decorating and firing.

This is highly appropriate to Durbanville’s history of having some of the best clay quarries and brickfields in the Western Cape. It was this aspect of Durbanville’s past that inspired the foundation of a Clay Museum, which was the first of it’s kind in South Africa. Maartin Zaalberg was the chairman of the Clay Museum sub-committee who initiated the drive for the Clay Museum. It was officially opened on Sunday 26 October 1986, by the well-known master potter, Esias Bosch.

The museum is not only frequented by adults, but also by school learners doing art projects and needing information on certain artists.

The display is continually augmented with new work and also includes the “Oude Meester” Collection, Linn ware and ethnic pottery.

The exhibition changes frequently, incorporating yearly retrospective exhibitions.

We work in conjunction with the Ceramics SA (Western Cape) who also uses Rust-en-Vrede as their administrational address.

As part of our Skills Development programme we have successfully trained potters who are now working full-time in various studios in Cape Town. We regularly host well-attended ceramic workshops where less experienced potters and students are shown the finer techniques by master potters.

The Cube

The display cabinet is a recent addition to the Clay Museum.

A request by visitors to the Clay Museum for "take away ceramics" has resulted in the design and implementation of The Cube. We exhibit 90 small ceramic pieces by various potters. The pieces consist of bowls, mugs, jugs and sculptures.

The exhibitions in The Cube are shown for two to three months at a time and all works are for sale and may be removed immediately. So, if you are looking for small as a gift, you need look no further than The Cube.

Clementina van der Walt

http://www.clementina.co.za

According to Clementina van der Walt, her career as “serious” ceramist began in 1983 when she aligned herself with the international intellectual movement championing the metaphorical qualities of the ceramic vessel. The ceramics she produced during this period demonstrated a stylistic affinity with those by like-minded vessel advocates in America and Britain, but her work was also infused with an energy informed by the South African social and political turmoil of the 1980’s. This early work laid the cornerstone for a profound association with the ceramic vessel that has been the hallmark of van der Walt’s career.

Convinced of its “cultural relevance”, in 1987 van der Walt no longer saw the need to intellectualize the ceramic vessel, and turned her attention to producing utilitarian ware. The positive response to this ware, combined with van der Walt’s growing interest in surface decoration, encouraged her in 1988 to begin decorating blank ready-made ware with over-glaze enamel. This system of working allowed the artist to dramatically increase her productivity, and by 1997 she had built up a thriving production studio with ten assistants. Commercially successful, these ceramics incorporated the “joy and energy” of African motifs, and were widely appreciated for their distinctive nature and handsome design. The ware became something of a local icon when in 1995, a tea pot from the van der Walt studio became widely recognized thanks to its use in a Freshpak rooibos tea ad airing regularly on national television.

Throughout this period of commercial success, van der Walt simultaneously created individual works in which she explored more “esoteric” and “less marketable” concepts. As one writer noted, these two enterprises sustained one another. But in 1993 van de Walt went to Bethulie to spend ten days working with the ceramist Hylton Nel, an “acknowledged master of individual, …idiosyncratic tableware and ornament”. This experience
awakened a renewed appreciation for irregularity in form, which van der Walt quickly introduced into her individual works, but which seemed at odds with what she perceived as the perfection and slickness of her production ware. At the same time van der Walt became more concerned with the ritualistic and even contemplative role of tableware in many cultures, and she developed an awareness for its potential to embody the sacred within the ordinary. Increasingly, she felt a need to find a format that would allow her to explore these questions and their deeper meanings, and her production ware seemed more and more contrary to this direction. Finally in 2000 she sold the production studio to Café Africa in Cape Town.

After giving up her commercial venture, van der Walt delved more deeply into the meaning of objects used in African rituals – particularly masks which she incorporated into her oeuvre. Conducting a series of dialogues with refugees and displaced persons from Malawi and the Congo in 2004 , van de Walt used the ceramic masks to raise questions regarding the status of people within society. Often, the faces of those she interviewed provided the inspiration for the masks. In 2005 these masks found their way onto rectangular ceramic tiles which became part of large ceramic murals that also included rectangular tiles decorated with images inspired by African alphabets and with bits of poetry by Karen Press and Jeni Couzyn. Evolving from her decorated plates and her on-going interest in surface design, van der Walt’s murals are the amalgamation of many of the issues that have driven her work as a ceramist.

Clementina van der Walt’s career as a ceramist has been an on-going journey in which the she has relentlessly explored the many layers of cultural relevance that defines the ceramic vessel. Much of this exploration has been fuelled by the tension she felt as a Jewish-Lithuanian immigrant’s daughter in an African country that has inspired her and provided her with a rich lexicon of motifs, images, colours, and ideas. There is a sense that van der Walt’s recent work is in fact a synthesis of these issues and resources. She has reached what she describes as a “crossing point” in which the vertical of sacred interests intersects with the horizontal of the
“everyday business of material life”. It is in fact the search for this point – where the spiritual meets the profane – that has been the object of this artist’s journey.

- Sanford Shaman