Artist Statement
The earth has always been my very best playmate. As a child I created my own fairy tale world making mud pies, building mud houses complete with stick furniture and leaf carpets. I grew up in the wet wildness of the Lowveld, now called Limpopo province, which lavished on me unlimited supplies of material for my art. For the past thirty years, using clay as medium has formed an in
tegral part of my life, and looking back I see how I have given expression through it of the changing seasons of my life. I have no formal training in the arts or ceramics, but sports a B.Sc in Mathematics to impress people with. I trained with a production potter in the 1980’s and fell in love with the heads over heels speed in which I could spin out pieces on a potter’s wheel. Then a season of being a commercial potter followed. I delivered thousands of bonsai bowls made on order for a large nursery, loading them in the back of my kombi, along with my children’s sport gear. Though it supplied me with some pocket money, it wasn’t nourishing to my creativity. The season for using clay as medicine arrived when I went through a divorce. I discovered how expressing my feelings through sculpture brought healing and balance. Many of these sculptures now stand witness to my first realization of my true identity: that of being an artist. So here I am again: an artist child playing with the earth. Nature speaks to my soul. She speaks my mother tongue and I try to capture and show her beauty in the gently curve of a leaf form or the imprint of a lacy fern frond. The process involved in creating through the medium of clay in itself is one of using the very basic elements that give life on this planet: that of fire, earth, water and air. Maybe deep down, it is clay’s potential for primal expression that keeps me captivated by it. Maybe. But maybe I just enjoy having an excuse to play in the mud. Matilda Angus
