Sue Williamson Obituary
One of South Africa’s best known and most accessible and inventive ceramic artists, Bonnie Ntshalintshali, was lost to Aids this month, at the age of 32.
In 1985 when Fee Halsted-Berning started a ceramic studio at Ardmore, a farm in the central Drakensberg of KwaZulu-Natal, Ntshalintshali became her first pupil, and then studio assistant. From the outset, the young artist showed an astonishing facility for the ceramic medium, coiling and stacking and carving the clay into ever more elaborate totemic representations. In her work, Ntshalintshali combined religious and biblical themes with Zulu traditional and cultural references and fecund images of daily life. Fired at 1 200C, the pieces would be finished with intricate colourations.
In 1990, Halsted-Berning and Ntshalintshali became the first joint winners of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award.
In 1993, the year South Africa was once again invited to join the international art community at the Venice Biennale, Ntshalintshali’s work was selected for the avant garde “Aperto” section of the Biennale. Here, her typically totemic pieces looked wonderfully fresh, if slightly out of place among the videos of masturbating artists (Sean Landers) and reconstructions of chaotic studios (Elke Krystufek).
Last year, in an exhibition entitled Down to Earth/Okuvela Emhlabeni, curated by Peter Visser, Ntshalintshali’s work travelled first to East Hampton, New York and then to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The most complete documentation of the artist’s work can be found in Ardmore: An African Discovery by Gillian Scott, (Fernwood Press 1998), and examples can be seen in the collections of the South African National Gallery, the Durban Art Gallery, the Tatham Gallery in Pietermaritzburg, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and at Unisa, Pretoria.