Noria Mabasa
Noria Mabasa had no formal institutional art training but did receive local training in the making of clay pots. Like many other rural artists she explains that the source of her creativity lies in dreams and instructions from an ancestor.
In the early 1980s Mabasa was commissioned to make a set of clay figures for the then Venda Development Corporation. At about the same time she started making single free-standing figures that are about a metre high and face forwards with no shifts and turns in their bodies. Sometimes they make a small gesture like lighting a cigarette. This style is partly due to the limitation of the coarse clay and the traditional technique adopted for making pots – piling up and then smoothing rolls of coiled clay until the form was complete. The whole was then fired in an open pit. Mabasa applied commercial paint to the baked form to add detail and difference. It is in the subject and surface that Mabasa departed from tradition. Read More…
