In seeking “a more fluid world”, Belinda Blignaut (who was born in 1968) explores materials that will allow her to challenge the rigid norms and structures of life and art: like her ceramic pots that literally break their bounds, turning into sculptures of misshapen vessels and forms.

Over many years, working with many kinds of material, Blignaut has been concerned with issues of transformation and change, with the body at the centre of all. In her performance piece, Working from the Inside, her own body literally is at the centre, as she stands inside a clay vessel that she is building around herself. In this process, she forms a second skin around herself, of clay – or as she calls it, an “earth skin”. She writes: “…clay/mud/earth is filled with memory and a history of millions of years – in a constant state of flux.”

She says: “I’ve come to believe we have one story to tell and keep finding different ways of telling it.”