No Rain No Flowers: Failure, Materials, and South African Identity in My Ceramic Practice

The Lesson Begins

I came to ceramics without training, and therefore without any reasonable expectation of success.

I had an honours degree in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town and I had always painted, but I had no ceramic knowledge. What I had was a curiosity for clay, and for the first time in my life, time.

My journey with ceramics coincides with the birth of our first child. I was at home with my baby, and had a little time to play. My first experiments were seen by Trent Read from Knysna Fine Art. I had made a series of ceramic platters. He bought one, it was called The Alternative is Worse, and offered me my first exhibition. An exhibition of vases. I say that Trent found me, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen :) Sixteen years later I am pleased to say we have shared a very happy journey together.

Ever since that first exhibition, I have been using the vase, that ancient, domestic, welcoming form to comment on daily experiences in South Africa. Something difficult. Something about fear and beauty held in the same breath.

Failure

When I first tried to hand-coil a vase, I failed spectacularly. I was alone in my studio, and taught myself through watching YouTube videos, experimenting by mixing my own stains and glazes, trying to recreate the lead-based glazes from my inspiration: the Staffordshire Slipware Potters.

I was building pieces that would take weeks of labour only to crack during firing.

Ceramics, I learned quickly, is one of the least forgiving mediums available. Unlike painting, where mistakes can be painted over, where corrections are invisible, clay demands absolute commitment at every stage. Built poorly and the structure collapses under its own weight. Fire it improperly and months of work becomes rubble.

I remember the first major loss. A vase I had spent nearly five weeks constructing exploded in the kiln. No warning, no gradual failure I could have anticipated and corrected. Just gone. The emotional devastation was profound. But something shifted in that devastation, something I could not have anticipated. The will to get up again and recreate that same piece from scratch. For my first exhibition in November 2013 at Knysna Fine Art, I made 20 vases; of those, 13 cracked in the kiln. To introduce the exhibition, I wrote the following essay:

Before this exhibition in March this year, I had never made a coiled vase. Trent Read asked me to have an exhibition of vases, and I said I would.

I went home and went on to YouTube and typed in how to make a really big coil pot. From there, it has been an upward struggle against the ceramic medium. I have had technical difficulties that make me want to weep. I have no training in ceramics and no one to work with, so I am alone in my studio and have to figure it out through trial and error. It’s a desperately lonely feeling to open the kiln to a vase that has shattered. I think it must be one of the least forgiving mediums for an artist to work with. I call up real potters and ask for advice, but because I live in Keurboomstrand, none of them are able to come and look at my problems, so it’s all a bit vague.

I have grown used to cracks. I don’t mind them. It reminds me of the process, the transformation that the clay body goes through in the kiln.

The vase as a canvas has its own language, a presence that is genuinely welcoming and friendly, an object that sits well in the home. These vases offer a reminder of the fragility of the human spirit and the tensions that are formed by our everyday actions. The process is timely, unpredictable and unforgiving, the result always surprising.

I got lucky with my first vase, the White Tiger.

It came through three firings without cracking. The walls of the vase were very thick, and it was very heavy. It is a surprise that it didn’t crack. I started off by building this vase inside an existing salad bowl we had, and then I turned it upside down and built upwards from there.

The book The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga is set in India. The White Tiger is the name given to the child in a village who is deemed most likely to succeed, to escape the social position of his birth.

The Geography of Struggle

When we settled in Keurboomstrand, just outside Plettenberg Bay, without realising it I had distanced myself from creative interference. I remember being pleased by the fact that we didn’t drive past any billboards. This move was a huge contrast from London where we had spent the last four years. When I came back to live in my home town, I was struck forcefully by something I had perhaps taken for granted before: the financial inequalities, the walls and gates and security precautions, the way people navigate fear as a constant presence. The way we all learn to look the other way. I made this vase:

Living here, struggling daily with a material that resists and rejects my efforts, I began to see a parallel. South Africa itself is unforgiving.

Like working with clay, it demands that you show up again and again, knowing that your effort might result in nothing but dust.

But the vases that did survive the kiln held something true about what it means to persist here, in this complicated place, against odds that seem designed to defeat you.

Love Story

I like to acknowledge my love-hate relationship with ceramics.

There is a saying I have come to understand in a new way: no rain no flowers. Without the failures in the kiln, without the vases that shattered and the glazes that ran wrong and the firings that went awry, I would never have developed the technical language that is uniquely mine.

Through trial and error, through casualties that made me want to weep, I learned to create surfaces that are visually and texturally rich in ways I could never have imagined at the beginning. No teacher would have taught me the technique that I have now mastered on my own, and if they had taught me, it would not be as unique as the visual language I have developed on my own, because my visual language captures my life in all ways: anger, frustration, monotony, joy, and this is because my work is a reflection of my lived experience.

The hand-mixed stains and glazes that give my vases their deep, colourful character, I only developed these through repeated failure and experimentation. There was no instruction manual telling me the combinations that would work, the temperatures at which particular effects would emerge. I had to learn through making, through failing, through the slow accumulation of small errors that eventually became expertise.

This is profoundly South African, this understanding. We live in a country where the odds often seem impossible. Where fear and violence and inequality are not abstract concepts but daily realities. Where privilege and precarity exist in sharp relief. Like working with clay, living fully here requires accepting that you will lose things. That your efforts might result in nothing. That the struggle is constant and relentless.

The seduction of the surface—the shiny, textured quality created through hand-coiling and careful glazing—is deliberately placed alongside confrontational content.