Emerging in the early 1990s, Belinda Blignaut (b.1968, South Africa) was one of the group of young conceptual and experimental artists in Johannesburg whose work served as a commentary on the social and political uncertainty of South Africa, often in challenging or, at the very least, critical terms. Belinda Blignaut’s work suggests an urgency for protest and social change. 

Through varied series over decades, she has been processing issues around transformation, with the body at the centre of all. Through an engagement with the most everyday materials she hopes to translate the ways we adapt and communicate, a quiet visceral investigation into life and the creative process.

Her more recent work takes her interest in materiality as a metaphor for psychological transformation into a series of sculptural clay vessels. The 'vessel' to Blignaut, represents bodies, our bodies. In looking to create from a deeper source, she began working with earth. Digging her own wild clay and sourcing pigments, she allows for chance, unknowns and natural reactions of matter in intense heat and fire. She translates psychologies of people and place in each piece, seeking complex surfaces and celebrating imperfection through transformations in this honest and raw terrain.