ARDMORE: The African Ceramic Artists You Should Know About!

hi and welcome to this week's video you can tell i'm beaming i'm really really excited at the moment because i'm here with faye who founded ardmore ceramics in south africa honestly one of my favorite places i just love everything that you do and i'm really excited to introduce your work to everybody if you haven't heard of ardmore yet i think your mind is going to be blown can you tell us a little bit about but more importantly i was so excited to meet you stephanie because a dear friend of ours mary slater and and over lockdown came and says you've got to watch this program i found you your favorite program for chateau diaries so when catherine came while i was riding my horse and she said you've got to come quickly you won't believe it we had no idea so we were driving past so exciting and thank you so much for loving our but it's not it's not unfortunate that this has happened because mary knew that i would love your program with all the color and design and your beautiful spaces so this is all meant to be i think we both believe in being stronger with people as communities we are stronger there's nothing we can't achieve with others and also a love of happiness bright colors just living living art yes living art as i said you earlier we are because of others you know and if you share and you reach out it all comes together odd more started because i lost my job funnily enough i was lecturing at durban technicon and i didn't know what to do so all i took was my hands i was reading because i've been reading your really fascinating book that you didn't lose your job for anything you had done but because you're a woman well yes those things happen south africa has been a very chauvinistic society with ladies bars and men's bars and not only that we have that but we had blankies and neo blankies black toilets and white toilets so it was a little bit like that in the old days um but i decided when i lost my job my teaching post that i would go and go to the farm where my delicious young husband to be was and we always follow men you know that's the way it goes but i wanted to help people that didn't have opportunity and i started working with bonnie and charlene charlie who had polio she was a young girl on the farm and she and i went to win the standard bank young artists award and then her sisters joined and her aunts and then the men decided oh my goodness these people can earn money and play they thought of ceramic working as play because as heard boys they would model little clay oxen well they attended daz cattle because they didn't have toys so out of the culture the zulu culture of craft basketing which is raw colors you know iron colors and straw colors and these beautiful in intricate designs zulu craft is what it's all about and you put that together you put the toys you put the cows you put the birds you put it all on top of these magnificent cumbers which were for carrying water and you end up with ardmore that's how odd moore's evolved so it's this history it's a history a cultural craft culture that came together in ardmore yes and which is culminating yes in fine arts now yes could we possibly go on a little tour and see how things are made it's the most beautiful place i can see how you'd be inspired every day you just look out here i live on this was an old lavender distillery so we like you we're in a always in a flux and process and we're now building my first ever artist studio oh we've always worked out of a chicken house and a stable and now the lavender distillery the whole farm that was a field over there of lavender when i first came so the owners had been to france and they imagined us so the color of the buildings is they were in provence yeah you can see it's as rudimentary as this sometimes the dogs run over them and you've got to protect them but here they're building leopards this is drying out now so they will apply the legs later and you know if you put the legs on that would just squidge down the weights so it's all done in pieces and yeah and then they they get built up how magnificent is that that's a commission that's a king cheetah so i always have a bit of fun with the king cheetah because he's a very rare cat i always say he's the man i've never found the elisa he's there but i've never found him you quite literally have made a globally renowned brand you've worked with hermes you've had several christie's exhibitions colin's son the wallpaper with collinson the creative designer shauna dennison she said we want to come and do wallpapers and now you're on your second collection and in fact nick has just used one of the wallpapers from your first collection for his study in belgium so it's just it's crazy all these connections wonderful love it i love it and when people wear our homemade scarves and i'm in an international airport i sort of go um yeah you're part of the team global fame and you've never had an artist's studio exactly just as you work with what you've got through lockdown we went back to the pangolin which symbolizes protection and that's going into a hidey hole how that's like a hedgehog and the pangolin is a very endangered animal and these textures so each scale has been made by an artist called tabisso this is extraordinary i was looking at this earlier the pangolin is an endangered animal it's a mammal it breast feeds its gestation periods nine nine months and it's tongues attached to its spine actually and it lives on ants oh and it symbolizes protection so during lockdown we went to making these vortexes of holistic trying to find balance in nature with the pangolin and each scale has been done and put together so these are beautiful works and it's exquisite and then these are the salt and peppers you see the artists i give ideas and then i leave it to them and look at beautiful nellie's hair you can see where textures and braiding and weaving and baskets all come from i love that and alex alex is renowned for his large-scale riders and this is a commission for a father his three daughters um are giving it to him for his birthday so here they are in a rhino the three girls and here you can see the development of some more rhinos alex i really love them there's a giraffe these are betty's beautiful little birds um here she's done a little jug and these are little teapot nests and the weaver bird symbolizes my son getting married and making this they build a house and then laying the eggs and they're expecting my first grandson in april oh congratulations yeah so these are our little birds nests and there's a little uh bird with his little var so that betty's known for her birds they are beautiful really really stunning and then we're doing some life-sized wild dogs and we're working with singita the beautiful game reserve up in the sabi and we're doing them life-size so they painted dogs wild dogs and i thought we'd make this whole pack life size so you've got three so i've got three so far then i want some pups will these be painted yes they'll be painted here we've got i think another wild dog are being made we keep them under plastic so that you can keep working on them so i've never seen animals this scale in ardmore no no this is this is my 2022 idea of doing more fine art rather than little things going big otherwise dead not only a life-size animal but the full pack this is a finished piece and this is a candlestick so this has been thrown and then the artist is this is pomotzo he's built this all up around here and then we haven't glazed this this is stone finish we play with matte and shiny and is this from the designs you're doing for tablecloths yes that's called the sabi tablecloth oh you'll see the elephants and the leopards how long have you been making fabrics since 2010 uh when my son jonathan finished at university i said to him uh let's start a new business together and both my daughters are fine artists both of your daughters this is this is something i want to ask you about because you arrived here there were there were not these artists they're not trained for this and now training everybody you know seems to have an extraordinary talent so i think you have to have something to do with that i think it's just making people believe in themselves energizing the more seeds you sow the more it grows and i just love it i love their interpretations of it i believe in blueprint so i'm not dictating or controlling it's just really giving inspiration so inspiration like you'll find an artist you're interested in interesting things and then i leave it to them so for example these um these are these chinese garden stools and we've ended up doing these but they've got their own funny habits yeah so these are odd more ones oh yeah this one's had a bit of damage it was quite ambitious this one's upside down well actually just as we arrived we saw that uh people who have pieces that are damaged can actually send them right that's part of our business philosophy that's important like back because we don't believe that when it's damaged it should be thrown away it's not a teapot that the handle is broken they sculpture so we can give it more love like the doctor this is a little repair studio so you know often you lose a little piece yes and we come and we we fill it and reap like there's a slight little crack because i mean we really push clay the artists push clay sizes and dimensions that are quite something like this yes this is actually going to italy i think if this is the vets this is the face and we you know i don't know if you know with a chinese culture they they inlay gold and they staple that's more valuable yeah so i just feel it's extra love and care it's another process yeah it's not uh it's not damaged good so it's part of it part of its life we've all had a few stitches somewhere we've all a bit got scars walks there's a there's a little line you see they they're looking at those yes but it won't end up like this you know i'm just saying to them be a little bit freer and not as uh not as rigid and these have been great success these little monkeys and that's a little mask and he's got his glasses on and then they paint them up with all sorts of patterns so you can see here there's a lovely vortex of a primal and a crocodile and a chameleon of course chameleons adapt to change so it's adapting to our circumstances so once they're dry you can see this is a gray color and then it goes whiter with with the dryness that's a lovely snail oh so this is exactly the same material it's the same material just a different drying stages and then they go into the kilns so you have to make sure they're very dry before you put them in that's a lovely little vials that betty did which i think is beautiful and and then they go into the kiln and then they come out at what we call bisque finish and now it's ready for painting so they clean those all up and then they begin painting this is a pair of rhino urns that uh sea is doing uh it's part of a rhino conservation exhibition that we are doing with singita the artists went into singita yes they were with anti-poaching unit and they learned all about conservation so these partnerships build these wonderful relationships and the inspiration they must have got being at singapore and marketing and stories yes and the one story that i loved that they told me was about this one dog that caught 300 pouches so when we do a rhino piece now i said that excites me the story of the dog and the poaching anti-poaching guy who actually was a poacher whose singita turned around so that for me is a story so you think there'll be sculptures about that starting i feel with these two urns you see the difference the painting makes where here it's just at the beginning of the process beautiful african design yeah fantastic and that's what i love is this combination of you've got here in china you've got french serve you've got staffordshire figure you've got african design myolica it all comes together here you can see our little monkeys with their binos these little tourists and this is very 18th century french because they had exactly those exactly but the joke is during covert all our tourists vanished so the animal's looking at us where are you he has a lovely painting studio here this is a guy called mulungisi and he's busy painting this elaborate tray exquisite and here is a from the you know the lataba wallpaper so that's a lovely vase with elephants yes so this is one of your coal and sun wool paper yes and this one is actually with the ardmore sculptures so it's before it's been designed and drawn it's the process of cutting out ardmore photographs of sculpture and putting it all together that's how it's done that's how it's done and then it's flattened into illustration yes and that's one of our scarves and so what mantle is doing he's following the colourways of the scarf you can see the sabi and paola lilly here and then i come and i have a look and i think oh those white elephants are actually gorgeous and then this they've used the satara wallpaper here and you can see he's painting that all there so here's a garden still that's in the process no the talent's breathtaking it's breathtaking so this is the belly button and the most important part of the process it's the kiln room so we've decided to leave this piece in white and we've got these ready for blaze so they get warmed again this has actually got the glaze on it it's silica it's transparent and there we've rubbed it off so this will give a stone finish we just take our hand and we gently rub away the shine so this will be toffee apple shine so if you want a more serious feel to the piece you just rub it off and then those go back and they kill and of course you can't have them touch because it'll stick and what percentage of breakages do you get in the firing process no we're very good i don't know what's happened here this is not broken so i was thinking maybe this little pangolin we could make something it's an umbrella for a rider but where you know you can do things like that and then knock it off and maybe make a little sculpture or something okay so you can always use always someone i don't waste not want much see the see the potential through and and save it for the for the sculptor another art form is in the packing the love and tlc and care that goes actually into the packing of these works is amazing and we actually make bandages from tissue and fur yeah and then the pieces get bandaged well i was amazed because i actually bought the elusive nick a beautiful pangolin plate from ardmore online for his christmas present and i was thinking it's never going to arrive in one piece and arrived in belgium perfect the boxers even get a label on saying please sit down have a cup of coffee don't rush because often clients break their things in excitement it's like christmas and this is going to cape town one of my favorites that was done during covert a little bit of influence from the wallpaper the lataba patterning here but here the monkeys it's based on the sea no evil hear no evil do no evil hence the four uh but they're all teaching us what to do during covert so they've got their little sanitizers they're taking temperatures they're wearing their masks but why i wanted to tell you the story was during curved lockdown we had scrap soviets and we turned them into masks i said do them for people who need food we'll sell them and make them and we'll feed the the community in the village wonderful and uh blow me if we didn't find this mark at the new york uh catwalk in new york last year and at uh london fashion week and you had no idea i don't even know how i got there so the design process is all hand done so this is a bonnie bowl bonnie and charlene charlie was the first artist who started with me way back in 1985 and she and i won the standard bank young artist award together bonnie was the first she was our flat person to win the standard bank there she has some pictures of her some of these big bowls you can see there's a little portrait of her this is one of bonnie's early works it's daniel in the lions a wonderful interpretation of zulu's shoes and many lines so she just made him with double heads very naive piece she did it in in 1990 and it was exhibited on the standard bank young artist award and we use just paint like the mexicans did there was no glazes but what is interesting here you will see how the zulu culture evolves from the traditional pots little cumber which are hand coiled with river clay and fired in in wood firings with cattle dung and they had no access to color no electrical kiln firings and then they traded the beads with the arab traders and then that ended up why they love the ceramic and how that design translated yeah the type of detail comes together when we started losing artists from hiv aids they started creating works to teach me and to educate and they just did them and it was how they expressed themselves so this is a doctor and his white double backbended trying to kill the monster those are eyes weeping at the top and then these fornicating sodom and gomorrah-like mess of people and then this chameleon type cyclops thing is is pooping out the bones and you've got the plague i always think of albert camus plague with the black spots you see those black spots and how it's mutating and they've used little parachutes like spore and their little sperm swimming around so the painter interpreted it without collaborating with the sculptor it's a very interesting piece here's another monster one where the arm's mutating into a frog and the hole a vacant hole has got no immunity and the snakes are putting the venom into the bloodstream and it's giving birth to death so these very strange things came out and they've traveled to the istanbul biennale they've been on show in new york very interesting and you lost so many of your friends your artists your sculptures over 40 people was terrible and to think no it's not even talked about yeah but and also you helped enormously in introducing the anti-retroviralistic so from the power of one um this beautiful funny little naive leopard story we're gonna turn this into a scarf in honor of bonnie and wonder boy another famous ardmore artist and so what we do is we put them on the live box we take a picture to scale draw it out and you know it's very simplistic the colors but that's that's what we want to do then what happens from here it gets scanned and goes on to computers and then it gets put together in the layout so it's a six ninety by ninety scarf or 138 and all these elements get laid out with a border yeah and we're going to put some of this money towards our arts trust so i've got a an idea about bonnie living on and giving back from there we print everything to scale so this is a table runner and this is a tablecloth this is a taste this is a tablecloth underneath printed to scale since 2013 we've designed for hermes we had the beautiful savannah dance that ended up on a surfboard as well scarves and bags and beautiful caftans and watches as well and also la master zambez and then we had bareback cat and flowers of south africa and this last year i contacted hermes and i said we are going to do our own scarves now but we're very happy to carry on designing for you and this is the king cheetah design so it's a flirtation between the male and female king cheetah these cheetah the king cheetah has rare spots it's genetic so this is a baobab type flower called the sabi lily and then these luscious delicious made up thai plants as well with the hupu flower and then the little tortoiseshell watermarks here which is uh locked down it's just a little symbol and a memory of lockdown sounds so lovely will this be on silk this these will be on silk and also a wool blend that will do those big wraps so this is our christmas color that's coming out we launched them in november okay and we just sold out backgrounds okay well put me on the waiting list you have your first customer for that christmas i love it this year if anyone else is interested how do people go about buying anything online just go to the website it's called ardmoredesign okay and dot co dot cd just go to add more south africa you'll find them well whilst we're here i don't want to leave without seeing the shop sure that's well you have a little chateau touch here don't you they actually came from france french doors i'm feeling very choked actually and someone had brought them in and was selling them and i said those are my doors and then we bought the windows and we added on up top there too so yeah so that's our little chat so this section of the gallery we try to show what we call the the master works or the fine art sculptural pieces and we put them on plinths it's been quite difficult on more determining what is what is art what is the home product um and a piece like this is is sculpture i don't see it as anything other than that i was locked down with an artist called samantha in challenge who is a nephew of bonnie my first artist and this crocodile represent ancient wisdom in the african culture the crocodile crosses as we know between land and water but he's very prehistoric so he has wisdom to know that we will go through a bad time hence the pangolin going into lockdown and then the victory of hope is what the sculpture's called here is the secretary bird the phoenix what we call bumbering or catching the snakes the covered and there's a little bat so that's a hand coiled in the old ucumber way of working and then this beautiful basketing and beading african paintwork that jabunin is done and that's a saddleball that's a beautiful saddleball uh piece done by victor that becomes of ours that beatty was doing the little yes well did betty do the large one she did that one as well this is the sarbi fabric that's in velvet and here you can see we brought the we bought the weaver birds oh yeah yes what a shop and these are the gorgeous scarves these are little pocket chiefs for men oh the colors we did them old school you know sort of old school colors with green and maroon sort of like house colors this was the original that we worked on um that's the oh it's very feminine yeah so this is the same pattern then that we were just looking at with the same flowers and then that little watermark here yeah and these are all printed in italy it's exquisite really it's exquisite this was a new um table range we did with the sabi again and we did it on a linen base and this is a poly linen so it's no ironing and easy washing i like that me too with the linen look blues are very popular yeah at la land with all the blue and white spot i think we can agree with you yeah the blue blue and white in fact we we actually did a whole new design we printed because of the popularity of blue and white the outdoor fabric in a dawn you see how that one is not as electric i added a little bit of pink and brown you see that brown's lovely here oh and then we did another one with the blue and white yes it's so timeless blue and white and it works with anything else that really would be stunning with this bow and why not mix things like that the cushions they're george so we do cotton silks and then the linens i love the yellow as well the first collection the zambezi collection is more classical and then we did a lot of work with annabelle's a nightclub in london oh and so i went sexy so with that's where we came up with all the more rousseau-like primitive okay designs with sabi there you can see it there so were you involved in the annabelle's um yes we've done that what they've done fabulous i love working with them we've done lights they've used our wallpaper and the wallpaper that's that's cevity that's the first wallpaper section very popular that colorway in particular is very popular i can see why first wallpaper book uh it's looking a bit worse for wear and there's nicknames wallpapers that's what he has in his study this one is called lipid walk my daughter megan's chose that one too yeah it's great and this is the latest color this is the latest collection and it is called jabula which is to celebrate jabula and this one celebrates the small insects the praying mantises and the dung beetles and then satin that's i watched a leopard with her cub for an hour so you'll see these designs coming through in the artist's work at the moment and then this one is kingdoms glorious africa kingdom and uh these are all endangered animals so you've got the painted dog the pangolin bush babies oh strange lizards and then this is very special her name was pumalele nene so we've called it nene design and it celebrates our wetlands in the midlands so it's this gorgeous naive cross-eyed little crowned crane those dupes little eyes and then this gorgeous simplistic william morris type flower and then this very painterly fish with scratch lines through the clay and then the sort of painterliness and then we go to lataba which is very safari yeah river in kruger it's where these big herds of buffalo and elephant come down to drink and it's like this bush theater because the elephants go first then the buffalo you know you just watch you can sit and watch this story unraveling and then the baboons come and there's a screaming match and and it's noisy and gorgeous you see it's very russo the jungle and these leopards it's it's nice this is what i like and what they did here is they've turned it into a a bamboo i love the sheen that it gives as well it gives a depth to it and this is brand new this color brand just been launched in october there's an artist called tilani and he's he's all hand done this is all hand coiled like the old ucumber pots so nothing's thrown here and then he's he just does this lovely dance it's this beautiful central baroque type of rhythmical flow and they all interlink and you know it's like they pollinate someone always says to me well what's odd more about fan i just say sex and that's the french you know and it's i think with the gold it's got that sort of opulent uh marie antoinette you know versailles feel to it i'm so drawn to i think because it mixes africa and europe so beautiful beautifully this is my other favorite well i love i love this piece and the artist this came out of covert so it was the safe houses and it's what happens during the floods and you we in this place of going into a safety net in a safe house but there's hope we will you know say hence the little parrots that will find their way and wing their way to a new land or a new way through it pangolin again symbolizing lockdown and these are all endangered animals the cheetah the pangolin the wild dog and those are priests you see he's in white and i thought gorillas from africa why have they put these gorillas on here and then i read up on gorillas and they stand for protection so they are the big bodyguards so instinctively intuitively they've worked with symbolic animals to to emphasize this we must protect we must safeguard we must look after i love it i really love that piece bae thank you so much oh it's been a pleasure having you i mean i just can't believe this amazing dream come true to meet you both me neither i honestly i feel almost as i've gone back in time and i had the opportunity to meet josiah wedgwood as he's just starting everything what you've done here uh for south africa is incredible well you know it's the talent the raw talent and to see people grow some people have done it don't even have parents you know their parents died and to see them grow that's what it's all about too it's about the people putting this beauty into the world ah as i said we must just live art and you do well thank you again sadly we have to rush off to pretoria i hope we see you in france i'm coming yes okay see you at la land okay and if any of you are interested in looking at ardmore their website is admore design i will put a link to it in the description box below so do check them out it's a thing of wonder

Channel: The Chateau Diaries

Views: 95,167

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Id: l1-Ayz-X4kQ

Length: 31min 34sec (1894 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 20 2022