A few days before she was due to board a flight to New York, ceramic artist Zizipho Poswa sat at a cluttered table inside the Salt River headquarters of Imiso Ceramics.
On the table lay something new. An hour earlier, a freshly delivered monograph surveying a decade of her artistic practice had arrived from the printers. The bright orange publication, adorned with a deep navy motif crowned by horn-like forms, had yet to be opened.
“I too haven’t even opened it,” Poswa said, laughing before we went on to discuss her upcoming New York exhibition.
This Friday, 26 June 2026, Southern Guild New York will open iMbewu (The Seed), a major survey exhibition tracing 10 years of Poswa’s artistic journey.
Derived from the isiXhosa word for “seed”, iMbewu gathers together works produced between 2016 and 2026, alongside three new sculptures. The exhibition explores the ideas that have become central to Poswa’s practice: womanhood, ancestry, cultural memory and the ceremonial lives of black women whose stories have historically existed outside institutional archives.
For Poswa, clay has never merely been clay. It is memory. It is language. It is inheritance.
“The seed is about planting for the next generation. I also received the seed from abaNtu abadala [elders]. I am using the seed of abaNtu [people].”
From Mthatha to Gqeberha to Cape Town
The journey from Mthatha to New York is neither accidental nor overnight. Born in Mthatha and raised between the town and the village of Qhorha near Dutywa, Poswa grew up in a household where creativity was encouraged even if an artistic career was difficult to imagine.
“Art, for me, was clear from the beginning,” she recalls.
Her mother, a trained psychologist who later worked in education, paid close attention to her daughter’s artistic inclinations.
She collected magazines such as Garden and Home, exposing Poswa to worlds and aesthetics beyond what was immediately available in rural Eastern Cape.
Her story contains many of the turns familiar to countless
South African women whose ambitions develop alongside responsibilities. She left high school as a teenage mother.
Today, her son is 27 years old.
The story echoes a generation of women whose talents were often forced to negotiate with circumstance long before they could negotiate with galleries.
Poswa went on to study graphic design at Port Elizabeth Technikon (now Nelson Mandela University) and eventually specialised in textile design and technology.
In 2001 she moved to Cape Town where she landed her first job in textiles, producing hand-painted tableware at a Steenberg studio. She went on to work in retail, including at Foschini, a period she remembers fondly. “I actually enjoyed sales. It taught me quite a lot about business and selling things.”
Today Poswa is not only one of South Africa’s most celebrated ceramic artists and one of the
co-founders of Imiso Ceramics, arguably the country’s most influential black-owned contemporary ceramics studio. Its origins are the stuff of local art folklore. They grew. Survived Covid-19. And are set for a major expansion from 2027.
Zizipho Poswa, the artist
Poswa’s work forms part of collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Princeton University Art Museum, among others. She has exhibited in Venice, Paris, Los Angeles, Chicago, Amsterdam and San Francisco.
Yet the language of her work remains firmly anchored in home.
She frequently cites Japanese ceramic giant Jun Kaneko as an inspiration, particularly his monumental scale.
She also admires Kenyan-born ceramicist Magdalene Odundo and the celebrated Nala family of ceramic artists from KwaZulu-Natal.
Scale has become one of the defining features of her recent practice. Producing monumental ceramic works requires navigating a constant threat of breakages. Just behind us was a large broken piece.
The technical demands of working with clay are immense. Moisture levels, temperature shifts and structural stress all become critical considerations when working at such dimensions.
Viewers often only encounter the finished object, rarely ever seeing the anxiety required to bring it into existence.
Back home, the Eastern Cape
Despite her international recognition, Poswa remains invested in the Eastern Cape. She returns regularly to Qhorha and continues to think about the region’s cultural and artistic infrastructure.
“There are still very few galleries in the Eastern Cape,” she says.
Gqeberha has many-ish. Mthatha has none. East London has some.
On 30 May 2026, Poswa’s long-time friend, artist and entrepreneur, Nelisa Mdledle, opened her new art gallery, Lasembo, in Berea in East London.
“Lasembo aims to connect local artists with collectors, curators and new audiences. East London is brimming with creatives but there are far too few dedicated commercial art spaces,” Mdledle said.
“We need more art galleries in the Eastern Cape. We need to educate our people to appreciate what we do. There is also a challenge with justifying art prices in places like the Eastern Cape. But it can be done. Neli has done it.”
Poswa believes more galleries, more exposure and more investment are needed, particularly in rural areas.
“The fact that there is me, uZizipho, means it is possible. It took me 20 years to get here.”
For young people in Mthatha, Dutywa, Centane, Komani, Tsholomnqa and countless other villages where artistic careers can feel unimaginable, Poswa’s journey offers a different narrative.
One that stretches from village roads to the Metropolitan Museum.
One that suggests ambition need not abandon its roots to be-come global.
New York! New York! New York!
As she prepared to leave for New York on Monday, Poswa described the trip as exciting and nerve-racking. But she resists framing iMbewu as an arrival. The title itself rejects that interpretation.
A seed is not an ending. It is a beginning.
“I feel like this is just the beginning. We are very excited about who we are and we are sharing that with the world.”
As we wrapped up this interview, we finally paged through the new catalogue that had greeted us when we first sat down. It traces a decade of Poswa’s increasingly ambitious projects, among them Ukukhula, Umthwalo to Magodi, iLobola, uBuhle booKhokho (Beauty of Ancestors), iiNtsika zeSizwe (Pillars of the Nation), Indyebo kaNtu and most recently, Imbeleko that was at Southern Guild, Cape Town, in February this year.
Unlike the traditional coffee-table book that often privileges images over insight, the catalogue demands to be read as much as it invites looking.
Among the contributors is art historian Dr Barbara Thompson, who writes: “To encounter one of Zizipho Poswa’s sculptures is not merely an act of viewing art; it is an immersion in the transcendence of a simple ‘pinch pot’ into a monument to Xhosa cultural heritage and symbolism, to female solidarity and to the enduring bonds between clay — practical and sacred, ancestral and living — and the female body it seeks to invoke.”
For those fortunate enough to find themselves in New York or are already there, Poswa’s iMbewu (The Seed) exhibition remains on view at Southern Guild until 3 September 2026.