Pottery is inextricable from who Lesley-Anne Hoets is and, after spending close to 60 years enmeshed in clay and creativity, she has stored up incalculable wisdom, cementing her space as an art teacher, innovator and creator.
Based in Gqeberha, Hoets visited East London’s CVD Framers last week Saturday to present a workshop to 18 local artists, demonstrating her love for ancient approaches to ceramics with pinch pottery, as well as her belief that artistry should foreground the importance of process as opposed to result.
In Bedfordview in the 1960s, when Hoets was eight years old, her father encouraged her mother to take up pottery as a hobby and before long, one of her mother’s creations had graced the family home and Hoets was instantly starstruck.
Enraptured by the possibility of bringing her own sets of plates and bowls to life, Hoets set clay to the wheel and by the age of 20, was a fully-fledged ceramicist with a studio in Johannesburg.
She has since remained single-mindedly committed to pottery and said she has never considered an alternative career for herself despite the financial instability of ceramics.
She is an internationally acclaimed ceramicist, who has won numerous ceramic awards such as Corobrick Award in 1982 and 1996. She also has a business, Hot Art, making free-standing ceramic fireplaces that are marvels to behold and are made from peta-lite, a fireproof clay.
She moved from oxidised stoneware to find her niche with raku, not only for the Hot Art pots but also her personal works.
Using a clay body that has a high proportion of red local clay, Hoets makes her forms by pinching , coiling and paddling with the help of all manner of tools from an old bank card to the inside of an alarm clock. Her adoption of low-fired burnished ware with glazed and unglazed areas reflects an influence of indigenous pottery and throwing the pots into a pit of sawdust thereafter enables the quality of living wet clay to be retained in the final fired form of her pots.
Hoets creates unique pots that range from miniatures to big fat ones and believes that colour and ornamentation are equally as important as form and devotes careful attention to the shape and mouth of each pot.
She takes around three weeks to complete a pot and works strictly only when the inspiration strikes. She describes clay as an animate form of life with a will of its own that communicates its desires and guides her deftly pinching hands.
She said that a career in the arts is rewarding and that its challenges sharpen an artist’s ability to adapt, to be resourceful and to find contentment outside of materiality.
Hoets’s work is influenced by the details that underpin the beauty of everyday scenes, like the latticed pattern of crisscrossed tree branches suspended in the sun’s light or the ornamental designs of old-fashioned biscuit tins — she aims to keep her mind empty and her imagination full of all that could serve as inspiration.
She believes that clay teaches one patience and forces you to live only in the moment because mistakes can happen in pottery once your attention is snatched away by anything else outside of the movement of the hands across the clay.
In 2003, she was faced with a potentially fatal health scare, requiring serious medical intervention, but she was insistent on pursuing alternative medical treatment options.
She has since been in good health and credits her pottery for saving her and for teaching her to trust in life’s predilection to reward people who live without fear.
Attendees of the workshop left inspired with Hoets’s refreshing take on pinching and her belief that raku firing captures the best of life’s qualities — its magical unpredictability and rapid volatility.
Hoets encourages us all to move slowly, through life and art and to imitate the cyclical slow process of nature. She encourages us to remember that art like life, cannot be goal-orientated or we may miss the beauty of the journey.