New ceramic sculptures by Louise Linder and Malcolm Payne

Louise Linder and Malcolm Payne will be presenting their new ceramic sculptures at their studio/gallery opening on Saturday 1st April in Kalk Bay, Cape Town.

Malcolm Payne has produced a series of fifty hand-built terracotta sculptures entitled Chimbrids (2014-2016). These works emanate from an earlier series entitled Mafikeng Heads (1987-1988). Examples are in The Durban Art Museum and Johannesburg Art Gallery.

The Chimbrids terracotta sculptures extend themes initiated by the Mafikeng Heads based on interpretations of early Iron Age ceramic sculptures, the Lydenburg heads from the Southern African region housed in the South African Museum, Cape Town, South Africa.

His new works trace intercontinental, cultural as well as sculptural traditions embedded in deep time from pre-Colombian, early Chinese and of course Nigerian Nok clay work. In some respects he sees much of these sculptural traditions in their role as funerary arts.

The choice of naming the series Chimbrids follows from the term used by the Chimbrids-project which deals with conditions for the creation of human-animal mixtures. This is not new in the history of human image production but has consequences within contemporary medico-scientific ethics, legality and philosophy. Chimbrid is a blend word (or portmanteau) fusing chimera with hybrid, hence Chimbrid

Louise Linder’s organic abstractions, entitled Vessels (2014 – 2016), engage the malleability of the stoneware medium to evoke nascent growth in the interplay between natural organic form and the internal body.

Louise Linder holds an MFA and MPhil from the University of Cape Town.
Malcolm Payne is an Emeritus Professor of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.