Rorke's Drift Art and Craft Centre
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Rorke's Drift Art and Craft Centre is a center for arts and crafts, including fine art, printmaking, pottery and weaving, located in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
History
Founded by the Church of Sweden Mission, Rorke's Drift Art and Craft Centre started producing weaving in 1965. Its first Swedish directors were Ulla (an artist and weaver) and Peder Gowenius (an art teacher), both graduates of Konstfackskolan in Stockholm. During the 1960s the three main production studios were established at Rorke's Drift (as it is known worldwide), and its staff continue to design and create tapestries and woven rugs, printed fabrics and stoneware ceramics to the present.
The Pottery Workshop started in 1968 with Danish supervisors (first Peter Tybjerg, then later Ole and Anne Nielsen) with founding throwers Gordon Mbatha, Ephraim Ziqubu, Bhekisani Manyoni and Joel Sibisi. Already expert ceramists from the neighbouring Shiyane-Nqutu region, Dinah Molefe and several women of her family joined the Pottery Workshop from the start as skilled hand-builders, accustomed to using traditional Zulu and Sotho coiling methods in the making of domestic izinkamba (beer pots). The gendered work-division in the studio’s ceramics —women coiling, men throwing— has been maintained to the present.
Through his consultations as intergroup mediator in the late 1960s, H.W. van der Merwe was alerted to the presence of Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and a need for assistance in its newly established Pottery Workshop. His wife Marietjie was an MFA (Ceramics) graduate of UCLA and a practicing South African ceramist who was able to offer her support to the studio at Rorke's Drift. Marietjie was appointed Advisor to the Pottery Workshop in 1971, and having designed and built a large oil-firing kiln in 1973, she continued to mentor the studio’s ceramists and to help with technical problems until her death in 1992.
In the era when apartheid policies denied a formal education to black artists and crafters, Rorke’s Drift also established a Fine Art School that produced some of southern Africa’s most renowned artists and printmakers (for example Azaria Mbatha, John Muafangejo, Dan Rakgoathe, and Bongiwe Dhlomo).
The authoritative publication about Rorke's Drift printmakers, most of whom were trained at its Fine Art School was written by Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin in 2003. Titled Rorke's Drift: Empowering Prints the book's publisher in Cape Town is Double Storey.
Christiane Voith is the current Centre Manager of Rorke's Drift Art and Craft Centre.
Location
Rorke's Drift is also the location of the battlefield of the Battle of Rorke's Drift (1879), a historical site in the Anglo-Zulu War where British troops defeated a large Zulu army. The nearby battlefield is a major draw for the region's tourists.