UNDERSTANDING A WINNING ARTWORK Nosiviwe Matikinca’s ‘Ndiziphiwe – They were given to me’

Ndiziphiwe – They were given to me - Nosiviwe Matikinca.

By Cate Terblanche, Curator, Sasol Art Collection

The 2023 Sasol New Signatures Overall Winner was Nosiviwe Matikinca, who received the prize for her work entitled ‘Ndiziphiwe – They were given to me’. This blog will explore some of the aspects that made this a winning work.

Nosiviwe Matikinca submitted her entry for the 2023 Sasol New Signatures Art competition at the regional submission point, the NMU Bird Street Gallery in Gqeberha. There she displayed the five pairs of fragile ceramic shoes on high plinths, and all the regional judges were uninamious in their acceptance of the work. The display of the shoes has evolved with their journey from regional submission to winning work and finally as part of Sasol’s permanent art collection. Displaying them on plinths elevated them to precious objects to be admired. From conversations with her afterwards, it was also obvious that she is passionate about her work, determined to use it to bring attention to another issue close to her heart.

The issue of education is at the core of her work, and specifically the challenges facing learners from less priviledged backgrounds. Basic necessities such as school shoes are often not available to them, forcing many learners to wear hand-me-downs which are mostly badly damaged and sometimes hardly wearable. These shoes are the objects that Matikinca presents to us, objects which force us to acknowledge the sad reality facing so many children in South Africa.

The use of ceramics is crucial to understanding the work. Matikinca wanted to collect a heap of shoes for her year-end exhibition, but the reality was that even though the shoes were damaged and unwearable, their owners were not willing to part with them as they were still functional in a way. Using the medium of ceramic slip casting, Matikinca created the replicas of the shoes she had obtained. The process is a highly technical one, and the resulting ceramics are very thin and fragile. 

Clay as a material is organic by nature. It can be molded and shaped into any form, and during the firing process, it changes consistency, supposedly hardened to resist knocks and blows. The nature of the clay speaks to not only the education system which tends to mold and shape the young child’s mind and future, but also the precariousness of the public schooling system in South Africa.

The thought of a young child wearing a pair of these broken shoes with their worn out soles, evokes a deeply emotional reaction in the viewer. By casting the shoes, the history, the wear and tear, and lived experiences of the various wearers are immortalised, while further deterioration is momentarily halted by the artist’s intervention. The cracked soles, barely holding the well worn, damaged uppers together, fail miserably in their primary function to protect and enable a learner, also becomes a tragic record of individual and collective traumas experienced by young children. In a similar way, government, educational institutions, and society at large, have failed the youth of South Africa.

For the final exhibition, Matikinca presented the shoes on the gallery floor, in a pattern that suggested the shoes had just been removed and left at the classroom door. The viewer can surely imagine the freedom that comes with removing ill fitting shoes and walking barefoot. The change in layout occurred due to a lack of available plinths at the museum, but conceptually the change implied that the shoes were no longer elevated and admired, but that the viewer ‘looked down on’ the shoes, commenting on how easily we judge others by their appearance.

Sasol acquired Matikinca’s winning work, which now forms part of the Sasol Art Collection. Once Sasol acquired the works, a curatorial decision had to be made regarding the protection of the works. The use of boxes (reminicent of the shoe boxes or gift boxes) seemed to be a logical extension of her concept. The shoes can still be viewed from above in keeping with the artist’s intention, but the boxes also point the way to a futher repurposed future for these objects.

The success of Matikinca’s work lies not only in her use of clay as medium, but also in the emotional response the work is able to elicit from the viewer. The shoes become a silent testament to the very real hardships faced by vulnerable young children and only the most unfeeling would not be moved by the work. 

Nosiviwe Matikinca will further explore the narrative created in her winning work in her first solo exhibition entitled ‘Ukungalingani Kwezemfundo (Educational Inequality)’ which is due to open on 5 September 2024 at the Pretoria Art Museum.