Jul
29
2009
Bonnie Ntshalintshali, Daughter of South Africa
Author: SamBonnie Ntshalintshali was a brilliant South African ceramicist. She was born in 1967, on a farm in KwaZulu. By the time she was eighteen, she was working for an artist, Fee Halsted-Berning, as an assistant in her studio near Pietermaritzburg. Halsted-Berning noticed very early on that Ntshalintshli was talented in both painting and sculpture, and encouraged her to pursue creating her own pieces. Just three years later, she beganreceiving awards, first the Corobrik Ceramics Award and then the Young Artist Award that was give to both she and Halsted-Berning by the Standard Bank. She also began studying with sculptors Ian Calder and Juliet Armstrong at the University of Natal. She started to create images of her own sculptures, in silk screen and they were exhibited in Grahamstown at the Print Festival.
She began by building or coiling the clay. Her forms are complex and innovative and once they were fired she painted them with intricate detail. She created visual stories on the pottery, mixed her views and her understanding of western culture and imagery with that of her traditional Zulu images. She was said to have piled the stories in layers. Her work is in high demand, represented at many of the fine galleries and luxury hotels South Africa supports throughout the entire country as well as in the top collections in the United Kingdom and the United States.
During the early 1990′s she presented shows in Seville and participated in the Venice Biennial. That exhibit was part of a touring show that was also put up in Amsterdam and in Rome. She traveled to Germany and was the guest of state functions and dinner parties. She did this all as a single parent. During the late 1990′s she began working from home due to her health issues. In 1999 she passed away due to ailments related to HIV. She is survived by her daughter, and by her tremendous body of work.