The Contours of Memory

Martine Jackson’s solo exhibition, Contours: Ceramic Landscapes Mapping The Self, on show at Art Formes Gallery, is a presentation of her latest large-scale ceramic sculptures and installations and the culmination of extensive exploration, mastery and expression over the past year.

WORDS Gina Dionisio PHOTOS David Adams (portrait); Courtesy of Art Formes

Cape Town ceramicist Martine Jackson has spent over twenty years in deep dialogue with clay, a practice defined by experimentation, precision, and poetic restraint. Through relentless exploration, she’s stretched the medium to its physical and expressive limits, coaxing it upwards and outwards in ever-evolving forms.

In recent years, Martine has unearthed a more intimate vocabulary within her practice. Her forms evoke ancient terrains: quiet meditations on erosion, time, and endurance. These sculptural gestures trace the shifting contours of both landscape and life, suggesting that to exist is, inevitably, to be shaped and marked by the passage of time.

Each of the ceramicist’s sculptures for Contours: Ceramic Landscapes Mapping The Self is a study in precision and rhythm. Hand-coiled in slow, circular motions from the base upwards, the forms orbit an invisible centre, expanding, contracting, and finding equilibrium along the sculpture’s sinuous waist. Every work begins as a drawing or a small clay maquette, a testament to Martine’s deliberate and exacting process. The result is a collection of sculptural forms that, from every vantage point, reveal an exquisite balance of proportion, movement, and poise.

Martine’s sculptures ascend like quiet monuments – they are grounded yet ethereal, imbued with the weight of memory. Their rounded, billowing forms evoke both landscape and architecture. The artist’s power lies in duality: her works are both presence and echo, solidity and breath. Each sculptural piece becomes a testament to this ongoing exchange: a refined conversation between material and maker, grounded in craft yet reaching towards the sublime.

“Martine Jackson’s new solo exhibition, titled Contours: Ceramic Landscapes Mapping The Self, is both impactful and exhilarating, for it represents a new voice in the field of South African ceramics, and it epitomises the exquisite pinnacle of monumental sculptural expression through clay,” says Art Formes founder Olivia Barrell. “Art Formes has a penchant for the quietly radical and works with artists who capture our attention for their technical ceramic mastery, innovation within the field, and beautiful conceptual framework — it is a privilege to host Martine Jackson’s new solo exhibition, which incorporates all of these complex elements,“ she adds.

Contours: Ceramic Landscapes Mapping The Self is on show at Art Formes Gallery at The Old Biscuit Mill in Cape Town from 14 November – 8 January 2026. | artformes.com

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