SOUTHERN GUILD ARTIST PROFILE: ZIZIPHO POSWA
Zizipho Poswa is a Cape Town-based artist whose large-scale ceramic and bronze sculptures are bold declarations of African womanhood. Born in 1979 in the town of Mthatha in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, Poswa studied surface design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.
In 2005, she and fellow ceramicist Andile Dyalvane co-founded Imiso Ceramics, whose handmade vessels and tableware have earned the studio an international following. Straddling figuration and abstraction, her anthropomorphic totems are characterised by an elliptical approach to form and bold colour choice. Her work is a deep invocation of her personal journey and an homage to the spiritual traditions and matriarchal stewardship of her Xhosa culture.
The artist’s first solo exhibition, iLobola (2021), paid homage to the spiritual offering underpinning the custom of ‘lobola’, or bride-wealth – the cow – with each of the sculptures alluding to a specific stage or role player in the negotiation process preceding a traditional Xhosa marriage. Poswa’s second solo exhibition, uBuhle boKhokho (Beauty of Our Ancestors), reinterpreted historic and contemporary African hairstyles from across the continent, many of which were embodied by the artist herself in an accompanying series of photographic portraits. In so doing, Poswa interweaves the personal and historic, situating herself in a vast and ever-expanding network of Black women who continue to self-define and affirm their own standards of beauty.
Poswa’s debut solo in the United States, iiNtsika zeSizwe (Pillars of the Nation), was her first sculpture series made entirely in bronze. Held at Galerie56 in New York in partnership with Southern Guild, the exhibition was inspired by the practice of ‘umthwalo’ whereby rural women carry heavy loads on their heads, often walking long distances on foot. With their elliptical forms balanced atop anthropomorphic bases, the works symbolise both the physical and metaphorical acts of bearing the load.
The artist’s most recent solo exhibition – Indyebo yakwaNtu (Black Bounty), which inaugurated Southern Guild’s Los Angeles gallery in early 2024 – explored African cultures of bodily adornment and ritual. Precious metal jewellery, beadwork, hair combs and pins made by master artisans across the continent are emulated as bronze-cast elements resting atop vast ceramic silos, revering and immortalising the valued positions these amulets hold. Reaching heights of over 8 feet tall, the series of five colossal ceramic and bronze sculptures is her most ambitious technical undertaking to date. The clay bodies were produced during a residency at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics, California State University Long Beach in Summer 2023, where Poswa worked under the guidance of renowned American ceramic artist, Tony Marsh.
Poswa’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Princeton University Art Museum, LOEWE Foundation, Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Schulting Art Collection and the collection of HRH Franz, Duke of Bavaria.
She has taken part in group exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco), Kunsthal KAde (Amersfoort, The Netherlands), Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago), Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (Los Angeles), the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial (Perth), and other galleries in New York, Paris, Milan, Hamburg, Liverpool and Singapore. She was one of 24 artists commissioned to create works for ‘LOEWE Lamps’, which debuted at Salone del Mobile in 2024.
