Andile Dyalvane is one of South Africa’s master ceramic artists, hand-coiling monumental forms, predominantly from terracotta. He was born in 1978 near Qobo-Qobo in the Eastern Cape and spent his childhood embedded in traditional rural Xhosa lifeways, developing an intimate relationship with umhlaba (the land, clay, mother earth). Dyalvane obtained a National Diploma in Art and Design at Sivuyile Technical College in Gugulethu, Cape Town, as well as a National Diploma in Ceramic Design from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Gqeberha, in 2003. As a member of the International Academy of Ceramics, Dyalvane has participated in residencies in Denmark, France, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan, and has proffered his insight through masterclasses and workshops both locally and internationally. His work is widely exhibited in museums across the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Vitra Design Museum, Iziko South African National Gallery, Pérez Museum in Miami, Denver Art Museum and the Design Museum in Gent to list a few. His work emerges from the mud, in communion with ancestral clay. His work is bovine, horned, dreamed, sometimes red-breasted and lilac-winged, sometimes lacerated with tectonic fissures, sometimes armed with careful geometries. Dyalvane, alongside ceramic artist Zizipho Poswa, co-founded Imiso Ceramics in Woodstock, Cape Town in 2005. He is the recipient of the 2015 Design Foundation Icon Award and was awarded a Special Mention as a finalist in the LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize in 2022. When talking about his work, Dyalvanes describes clay as “a tool to communicate and connect; to communicate who [he is], and who we are, and what we have been through and what we are capable of doing. That is what it means to be human.”
-Olivia Barrell