Collection: 'A Quiet Taking' – Lisa Ringwood

A Quiet Taking 

Lisa Ringwood

29.10.25 – 06.12.25

Amid the slow creep of development and gentrification along the once untouched coastline of Kommetjie, Lisa Ringwood’s ceramics stand as tender acts of resistance. Her vessels, covered in finely drawn depictions of birds, baboons, fynbos and indigenous flora, are not merely decorative; they are vessels of memory, mourning and deep ecological reverence.

Kommetjie, nestled between mountain and sea, is a place of astonishing biodiversity. It is here in this fragile, interconnected ecosystem that Ringwood lives and works, attentively observing the small lives that make up the biome: a beetle pollinating a flower, the fleeting call of a bird and the foraging habits of baboons. These details find their way onto her clay surfaces, which become sites of witnessing. The ordinary is elevated not for commodification but for communion.

But these vessels do not portray an untouched paradise. Layered over the delicate natural scenes are jarring interruptions: cranes loom, trucks crawl, ‘KEEP OUT’ and ‘DANGER’ signs slice across once-open land. These symbolic invasions tell a story of a landscape under threat, where freedom long synonymous with land and its inhabitants is now fenced off, monitored and mechanised. Clear skylines are disrupted by scaffolding; quiet mountain ranges by the grating presence of uninvited machinery. What was once a sanctuary for life flourishing in its complexity is now subject to extraction and enclosure.

By setting scenes of contradiction and disruption, Ringwood confronts the destructive logic of progress, where land rich in biodiversity is stripped bare and its non-human life dismissed as expendable in the face of commercial gain. The bulldozing of biodiversity is not just physical but symbolic: it reflects a deeper disconnection, a cultural amnesia. “If we don’t take the time to look and listen,” Ringwood suggests, “we lose our connection with Earth – and therefore it becomes easy to destroy what we do not know or consider useless.”

As development continues to erase the voiceless, 'A Quiet Taking' insists on the value of presence, witnessing and resistance. To afford purpose in the ordinary is not merely an act of wonder; it is a political stance, a refusal to let silence or indifference pave over what remains.

Each of Ringwood’s hand-built vessels – from the Earth, for the Earth – is an invitation to witness, to care and to resist the tide of forgetting. Ringwood’s ceramics ask us to slow down and offer a quiet but urgent call: to pay attention, to care deeply and to protect what cannot speak for itself. They remind us that the extraordinary hides in plain sight – in small bulbs pushing through dry earth, in insects whose roles are crucial and unseen, in ecosystems shaped by intricate mutual dependence. As Jacques Cousteau once said, “We protect what we love” – and through her work, Ringwood teaches us how to love the overlooked.

MEADOWLARK SINGS AND I

GREET HIM IN RETURN

Meadowlark when you sing it's as if

you lay your yellow breast upon

mine and say

hello, hello, and are we not

of one family in our delight of life?

You sing, I listen.

Both are necessary

if the world is to continue going around

night-heavy then light-laden, though not

everyone knows this or at least

not yet,

or, perhaps, has forgotten it

in the torn fields,

in the terrible debris of progress.

– MARY OLIVER