Born in 1960 in Cape Town, South African ceramicist Katherine Glenday discovered her vocation under the mentorship of leading ceramicist Marietjie van der Merwe. The artist has ever since pursued an unwavering path exploring the material’s wide range of expressive qualities while continuing to learn different time-honored techniques through ongoing collaboration with master ceramicists around the world.

Highly informed by visual arts, including both painting and drawing, her porcelain works explore the contrasts of emphasized organic textures on soft skin-like surfaces. Each of her pieces defies the materiality of the porcelain, stretching the matter to its thinnest; their translucent skin enthralls the natural light, while their silhouettes evoke the artist’s gesture as they quietly embody a movement. All while refining her technical dexterity and her artistic signature, Glenday has grown a cohesive body of work comprised of delicate vessels that accentuate the porcelain’s lightness and translucent quality.

Employing a variety of forming methods, most notably wheel throwing and occasionally slip casting, she sees the vessel as a circular canvas in movement. Inviting color and light in the pure matter, she introduces minerals and oxides often gleaned directly from the natural world, such as mud from the Niger River or clay from the Cedarburg, as her “paint.”

Although the formation of her work is often visceral and full of movement, the resulting pieces emanate a meditative quality.

Like autobiographical elements, many of Glenday’s works mainly result from the artist’s intuition with the subtle guidance of her skilled hands. More gestural and intentional, her most recent series have focused on exploring positive and negative space in porcelain, subtly echoing Franz Kline in his use of abstracted black “brush” strokes to create an interplay between light and dark.

“Katherine Glenday’s vessels defy stereotypical classification. They embody form and function, sacred and profane. They are symbols and metaphors while maintaining their implicit function as containers of air, of liquid, of sound and of silence. The clay that forms the translucent and transparent skin between the material and the immaterial. The primordial clay and the human potential to form, transform and communicate." - Rose Shakinovsky

SELECT SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2024
'In Colour', Ateliers Courbet, New York, United States of America

2023
‘Ancestral Houses’, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

2022
Ateliers Courbet, New York, United States of America

2021
‘Relationalities’, Ateliers Courbet, New York, United States of America

2019
‘Between’, Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, South Africa

2017
Les Ateliers Courbet, New York, Unites States of America


2014
‘This Personal and This Particular’, The Forge, Kalk Bay, Cape Town, South Africa

2008
‘Movement to Light’, Amaridian Gallery, New York, United States of America


2001
‘Tuning Narcissus’, Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, South Africa


1997
The Kim Sacks Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa

SELECT GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2024
‘Compressing Materiality’, EBONY/CURATED, Franschhoek, South Africa

2023
“Ceramics invitational exhibition” University of Johannesburg, South Africa

2022
The Ripple Effect, Conversations with Water. Association of Arts, Cape Town, South Africa

2021
Formed by light and fire, Throw Contemporary, London, United Kingdom

2019
Conversations with Irma, Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, South Africa

2016
First Central Plains Ceramics Biennale, Henan Museum, Zhengzhou, China

2012
SOFA NEW YORK 2012, New York, United States of America


2011
Conversations, Amaridian Gallery, New York, United States of America


2010
SOFA NEW YORK 2010, New York, United States of America
SOFA CHICAGO 2010, Chicago, United States of America


2008
Exchanges, The Forge, Kalk Bay, Cape Town, South Africa


2006
’Sound Still’, Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, South Africa (curator)


1995
Fletcher Challenge, Auckland, New Zealand


1992
International Exhibition of Ceramics, Taipei, Taiwan


1985
Recent South African Ceramics, Johannesburg Art Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa

RESIDENCIES

2006 -2024
Annual Residency with Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky (Goedgedacht farm, Cedar Peak Western Cape, and Poppiano Italy.)

2004
Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (KKNK), resident artist, Oudtshoorn

1993
National Arts Festival, resident ‘craft artist’, Grahamstown

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg
King George IV Art Gallery, Port Elizabeth
William Humphries Museum, Kimberly
Museum of Art and Design, New York
Iziko Museum, Social History Collections, Cape Town
The Tatham Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg
University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg
Rust-en-Vrede Clay Museum, Durbanville