In March 2026, four artists gathered at the Villa-Legodi for an intensive three-week residency: Nicholas Sithole, Clive Sithole, Sbonelo iHubo leNgabadi, and Ludwe Mgolombane. Between them, they span four generations of ceramic practice in South Africa — a living chain of influence and inheritance, in which each artist has received something from those who came before, returning it to the world transformed. To watch them work, side by side, was to understand that a tradition survives not in archives, but in the exact moment one hand shows another what it knows.

As a sculptural medium, clay occupies a complex and important place within South Africa’s art history. It is a material for human making that reaches back to the earliest expressions of creativity on this continent; and yet, it remains largely absent from the South African fine art world, both today and throughout the past several decades. Sidelined as craft, overlooked by institutions, and left undocumented in the archive, ceramics has endured a particular kind of erasure. In this way, the exchange of knowledge that took place during the residency, in which each practice quietly influences the next, like how fires in proximity share heat, was also a gesture towards the future; a deliberate act of transmission. Central to its vision was the sharing of knowledge, from the art of hand-building and the methods of smoke- and saggar-firing, to sessions that draw from decades of accumulated expertise, offering, in the most immediate and material of ways, a knowledge that might otherwise remain undocumented.

Importantly, nine students from two South African institutions, the University of Pretoria (Beck Glass, Laura Krog, Lehlohonolo Nale, Zita Oranje and Chelsey Samson) and the Tshwane University of Technology (Mohaladitwe Gumede, Adalgisa Mendes, Zama Shabalala, and Mkhululi Shongwe), also spent time in residence alongside the masters, observing, working, asking questions, and making their own works. For many, this was their first direct encounter with ceramic masters. What they learned could not have been found in any classroom: how to coax forms that resist the wheel; how to read the fire; how to find, in the making, something ancestral and alive.

Supported by the Claire & Edoardo Villa Will Trust, this exhibition presents the culmination of these residencies and workshops. It stands as proof of what is possible when the chain of making is taken seriously: when a tradition is understood to live not in the hands of the masters alone, but in every pair of hands that receives it.

— Olivia Barrell (Art Formes)