The agency, references and contexts in the oeuvre of the ceramist Henriette Ngako (1943-2021)

Original Research

Abstract

A significant part of the South African ceramic art history is not the outcome of original scholarly research and writing but, for lack of primary sources, derived from published material in craft publications, the press, and books of public interest. The latter texts typically reflect personal observations rather than citing and contextualising explanatory statements by the ceramists. In this absence of the ceramists’ own voices, observations by others tend to assume the status of being definitive of the ceramist’s output. This article illustrates the hackneyed earlier observations on the life and oeuvre of the ceramist Henriette Ngako (1943-2021) who was of the Batswana cultural group. Ngako created compositions of stacked, fanciful human and animal forms. Calling on new research findings, some of the claimed influences at play in Ngako’s oeuvre are questioned whilst others are contextualised. The article asserts that Ngako exercised agency in breaking with the Batswana cultural tradition of pottery to create novel forms that were unlike any works in the oeuvres of her peers and for which she captured the attention of collectors and gallerists.