Probing Issues of Indigeneity and Contemporaneity in a Collection of Rorke’s Drift Ceramics

Abstract

In 1988, the art collector Mark Bernstein donated to the University of KwaZulu–Natal a collection of seven vessels, produced by potters at the Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Center at Rorke’s Drift, in KwaZulu-Natal Province. This collection, referred to here as the Bernstein Collection, is displayed in the university’s Main Library in Durban. This paper explores the ceramics in this Collection, focusing on their indigenous narratives and visual designs in relation to Basotho and Zulu cultural representation. The decorations are figurative and contain iconographic signifiers that reflect both indigeneity and contemporaneity. These works were produced by several ceramic artists working in the Rorke’s Drift pottery workshop in the 1970s. Thematic analysis is employed as a qualitative approach to consideration of the ceramics and associated imagery. An autoethnographic analysis of these ceramic works in comparison with other studies and reliable sources shows that styles and genres at Rorke’s Drift were based on local and international cultural mediations, and the hybridity formed by abstract motifs, forms and patterns. These proved to be essential features for sustaining cultural identities within the studio context of the pottery workshop: a form of cross-cultural expression that facilitates harmonies of visual expression within the artistic communities involved.