One-night stands in white mustangs.
A solo exhibition by Amogelang Maepa
Curated by Karolien van Zyl
Berman Contemporary, Cape Town | 7 March 2026 – 3 May 2026

One-night stands in white mustangs begins in language and continues in clay. Each sculpture emerges from a poem written before the clay is touched. The works do not illustrate the texts; they translate rhythm, repetition and internal pressure into form. Desire operates here as a system rather than catharsis, structuring how material gathers, repeats and resists resolution.

Across the series, desire registers materially. Intensity gathers rather than disperses. Porous surfaces, thickened edges and areas of distortion suggest accumulation instead of completion, as if pressure from within has forced its way outward. Cellular textures, clustered deposits and ruptured skins convey the effect of force acting on matter over time. Each work holds the trace of processes that have built up, spread and unsettled.

Desire is approached not as fulfilment, but as recurrence. Forms repeat without stabilising. Surfaces retain what has passed through them. What remains is residue – the mark of intensity rather than its release.

The exhibition extends this logic beyond the objects into the surrounding environment. Reflective surfaces disrupt a single point of view. Objects, space and viewer enter the same circuit, where encounter is brief, partial and repeated.

The exhibition sustains a condition rather than a narrative. No single work resolves what it begins. Meaning does not settle; it lingers in a state of aftermath.

Something has happened. Whether it mattered remains undecided.

The Mechanics Beneath Longing
Donavan Mynhardt

Working with ceramics each day has taught me that it is an honest medium. The age-old Japanese adage: “There is no falsehood in ceramics. It is honest because it does not hide its scars,” sums this up perfectly. The earth remembers. Each recorded pressure, gesture, curve or crack tells of the creator’s patience, resilience, and hesitations trapped in the damp clay. Surfaces reveal the thinking of the artist long after their hands have left the work.

Encountering Amogelang Maepa’s ceramics, one becomes aware of the material’s innate candour, a quality that partners naturally with her other mode of expression: poetry. She has spoken of how both forms draw from personal experience, revealing the more intimate and honest parts of herself. Yet what makes her practice unusual, particularly within ceramics, is something more structural than sincerity. The realised forms do not begin as matter. They begin as language.

Each artwork originates as a poem, not as an accompaniment or caption, but as a structural foundation that shapes, both intuitively and consciously, every decision in form, surface and assembly. This deliberate reversal of ceramic convention positions language before material, meaning before making. Historically, there has always been a relationship between clay and text. From inscribed Mesopotamian tablets to the narrative surfaces of Greek vessels, this relationship has largely followed the traditional logic of ‘form follows function’. Within Maepa’s practice, that logic no longer holds. What dictates the origin of meaning here is language itself. The result is a body of sculptural forms in which desire, labour, repetition and exhaustion become visible through the handling of clay.

Italian archaeologist Agnese Livia Fischetti once described ceramics as “the only poetry that can be touched.” Every indentation, mark, or crack in the clay acts as a verse or line, recording the maker's hand and experience. Maepa’s ceramics operate as the physical extension of her poetry, sharing the same structural approach. Repeated lines become repeated gestures. Lingering phrases become thickened surfaces. Interrupted thought becomes fracture. In poetry, desire may unfold through enjambment and refrain. In clay, it unfolds through repetitive handling, coil after coil, press after press, slowly revealing itself in the visible trace of effort. Negative space, like the silence between words, is essential to the story that unfolds. By translating poetic language into material form, Maepa exposes the mechanics beneath longing; the work required to sustain it, the pressure it produces and the fractures it threatens.

The ceramics selected for Maepa’s solo exhibition One-night stands in white mustangs propose a deliberate repositioning. Where her work might first be read through the lens of intimacy or confession, or assessed against ceramics’ long association with utility, this exhibition asks for neither. Desire, longing and obsession are present, but they are approached here as conceptual systems rather than emotional disclosures; patterned, cumulative structures that demand intellectual engagement as much as feeling. This is what moves her ceramics from the utilitarian toward the sculptural. And yet concept and feeling need not be mutually exclusive. Even through a strictly cerebral lens, the traces of longing infused in each form remain fully present, waiting for the attentive viewer to find them.

The choice to work primarily in paper-clay is more than practical; it is conceptually resonant. Clay embedded with paper fibre carries an implicit reference to poetry’s natural home, deepening the dialogue between material and idea. Technically, the added organic fibre creates an internal support network that allows greater freedom in shaping and superior strength when dry. But beyond its structural advantages, the considerable malleability of paper-clay enables Maepa to redraft her verses into three dimensions, producing a sculptural language that mirrors the rhythmic structures of the poems from which it originates.

“I have stabbed you continuously only to resurrect you again
And again, and again and again and again and again
Only to keep stabbing you continuously
Until you are completely mine”
(Sin or No Sin, Amogelang Maepa)

The stylistic texture of her poems translates naturally into process-driven and systemic conceptual ceramic work, particularly in its repetition, cyclical action and intensity. The tempo, tension and obsession of the poems are not just embodied in the clay though, they are performed through it. Many of Maepa’s clay forms spill and stretch and collapse into folds, creating the illusory appearance of continuation beyond their boundaries. This physical lack of any clear beginning or end echoes the use of enjambment within poetry. The surfaces become part of the narration, keeping record of repeated actions as the clay captures every mark made by the maker’s hand and tool.

Through the acts of pushing, coiling, folding and pinching, the body’s engagement with clay leaves behind a somatic residue. These surfaces register fatigue and insistence, longing and withholding. They are not merely illustrative depictions of emotion, but the physical enactments of it. Tight coils, binding gestures, clustering forms and compressed areas materialise the desire, obsession, control and containment expressed through verse. Maepa’s ceramics literally show that they have endured something.

The resulting artworks are coloured minimally and treated with clear glaze to reveal any surface tensions and deckled edges. Many surface areas are covered in persistent puncture marks or layers of thick, compressed clay. The ceramic piece I Will Know Hunger is decorated by absence, clay removed to leave a pattern of irregularly shaped holes across a delicately thin surface. What is taken away becomes the statement.

Firing too is conceptual. Heat does not merely harden clay. It finalises tension and transforms earth into ceramics. It seals labour into permanence. What was once malleable becomes irrevocable. In this transformation the work mirrors the emotional states from which it emerged, exemplifying moments that cannot be undone, only endured. The kiln also burns away untruths, revealing underlying imperfections within clay structures. Unintentional crazing, blistering, cracking or bloating are the concerns of ceramists bound by utility. Here, freed from that obligation, these perceived flaws carry conceptual weight, they are not failures of making but evidence of it.

Wabi-sabi, the Japanese philosophy of beauty in imperfection and impermanence, resonates throughout Maepa’s work. Surface tensions and hairline fractures have been left deliberately exposed, not as oversights but as carriers of meaning. Damage here is not defect but record. In a practice rooted in poetry, where feeling is structural and process is argument, the pursuit of perfection would be a contradiction. Her work is not about functionality. It is not about the ideal. It is not about concealment. It is about becoming the structural embodiment of words. And words, at their most honest, can be unfiltered, abstract and raw.

South African ceramics have entered a period of conceptual expansion, crossing boundaries between sculpture, installation, performance and text. Across generations, practitioners have pushed clay beyond utility into territory that is intellectually rigorous and materially complex. Yet within this landscape a specific gap has persisted. Where the discourse has turned outward toward cultural memory, socio-politics or identity, the interior life has remained unexplored as serious conceptual territory. Maepa is a distinct and necessary voice precisely because she turns inward. She excavates the emotional, psychosocial and rhythmic systems that structure interior experience, and she does so through a methodology that is entirely her own: language as foundation, clay as its consequence.

By removing the obligation of use, she frees clay from its historical association with functionality and the potter’s relentless pursuit of perfection. What remains is clay as sculptural articulation: autonomous, resistant, and fully intentional. Her contribution to South African ceramics is specific and irreducible. The poem is not supplemental but architectural. Clay does not decorate the language but solidifies it. In doing so, Maepa produces a body of work that not only represents lived experience but gives material form to the mechanics beneath longing.

Donavan Mynhardt is Curator of Rust-en-Vrede Gallery + Clay Museum