For Bronwyn Katz, art does not begin in the studio. It begins around the kitchen table, in stories passed down through generations, in the memory held by the earth and in the quiet language of materials.
Recently named the 2026 Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Arts, Katz has built a practice that asks audiences to slow down. Her sculptures and installations resist instant interpretation, inviting viewers to sit with uncertainty rather than search for immediate answers. Instead of offering fixed meanings, Katz creates space for conversation between the artwork, the material and the person standing before it.
Speaking to the Mail & Guardian, Katz says the foundations of her practice were laid long before she studied sculpture at the Michaelis School of Fine Art.
"I grew up around people who loved sharing stories," she says. "My mother and my grandmother would tell stories about all sorts of things ghosts, people who worked with magic, stories connected to the earth."
Those moments became the blueprint for the artist she would become. Storytelling was never simply entertainment; it was a way of understanding the relationship between people, history and place.
"My interest in relaying messages and wanting to share information really started there," she says.
Her creative instincts were shaped just as much by making as they were by storytelling. Katz's father worked as a welder, filling her childhood with metal, tools and handmade objects, while her mother nurtured an appreciation for beauty and ornamentation.
"My father is a metal worker and welder, so I grew up watching him make things out of metal," she says. "That definitely sparked my curiosity. My mother loved beautiful things, so she informed my aesthetic sensibilities in a different way."
Together, those influences forged an artistic language rooted in both craftsmanship and inherited knowledge.
Although Katz has worked across sculpture, sound and video, sculpture remains the medium that best carries the stories she wants to tell. Those stories are inseparable from Kimberley, the city where she grew up.
While Kimberley is often reduced to its history of diamond mining, Katz is interested in histories that stretch far beyond colonial extraction. Her work explores the landscape through ancestral memory, oral histories and family lineage.
"I think my work is so much about place," she says. "It's about coming from Kimberley and the history of Kimberley as a place of excavation. But through the stories from my family line, the history of Kimberley extends far beyond diamond mining."
It is a distinction that sits at the heart of her practice.
Mining reshaped Kimberley's economy and scarred its landscape but Katz is more interested in recovering older ways of understanding the land ways that existed before extraction became the dominant narrative.
Growing up in Greenpoint, she remembers how mine dust settled over the neighbourhood, making it difficult for anything to grow.
"The soil was difficult to grow from because of the dust from the mines," she recalls.
Yet the stories passed down through her family offered an entirely different definition of wealth. "My grandmother would speak about wealth as being a garden. Being able to grow something from the earth in your own yard was wealth."
It is a philosophy that stands in sharp contrast to the extractive logic of mining. Today, societies often measure the value of land by the minerals hidden beneath it, overlooking the quieter abundance of fertile soil capable of sustaining life.
"We don't think of the wealth the earth possesses in terms of growing a cabbage," Katz says. "Instead, we think it's wealthy because it produces diamonds and minerals."
That tension between extraction and care runs through much of her work.
It may also explain why audiences often describe her sculptures as enigmatic. Katz, however, rejects the idea that her work is deliberately obscure.
"I don't think the work is incredibly complex or difficult to understand," she says. "I think it just needs someone to be curious."
Rather than directing viewers towards a single interpretation, she invites them to bring their own experiences into the encounter.
"I enjoy it when people tell me things about my work that I never thought of."
That openness extends to her choice of materials.
Copper, a recurring element in her installations, carries multiple meanings at once. It is a conductor of electricity and communication but it also holds cultural significance as a material associated with healing.
"Copper makes complete sense because of cabling, electricity and transmission," Katz explains. "But it's also a healing metal. Many of us remember elders wearing copper bracelets to draw pain from the body."
Instead of explaining what copper should represent, Katz asks viewers to reflect on their own relationship with it.
"What is your relationship with copper?" she asks. "Where does it come from? What does it take for copper to become copper?"
For Katz, these are not merely scientific questions. They are philosophical ones.
Minerals, she believes, carry their own histories.
"They've spent years and years in the earth," she says. "I believe they know things. They're sacred because of the time they've spent observing."
Her work ultimately asks audiences to see materials not simply as resources waiting to be extracted but as witnesses to histories that far exceed human lifetimes.
Being named a Standard Bank Young Artist marks a significant milestone in Katz's career but she is already looking ahead.
One of the award's greatest opportunities, she says, is that the exhibition will tour the country rather than remain confined to a single gallery.
"What I'm excited about is that the work will be able to travel through other regions," she says. "I'd love to bring the work to Kimberley and I'm working towards taking it there, as well as to Cape Town."
Returning the exhibition to Kimberley would be especially meaningful. For an artist whose work continually circles back to place, ancestry and memory, bringing those stories home feels like a natural continuation of the practice.
In a world weighed down by inequality, environmental destruction and political uncertainty, Katz continues to make work because the process itself sustains her.
"The work gives me the energy and the strength," she says.
Her studio is more than a place of production; it is a space of healing, reflection and possibility.
"I'm never alone in making the work," she says. "There are so many other forces giving me ideas, showing me things."
For Katz, making art is also a way of imagining worlds beyond the systems that define the present.
"The work helps me think about possibilities," she says. "What other realities are possible? What other realities have existed for people in my lineage that are different from the exploitative, capitalistic and oppressive reality we live in today?"
In that sense, Katz's sculptures are less concerned with preserving the past than with imagining different futures, futures shaped by memory, care and the enduring wisdom of the land itself.