During South Africa’s Heritage Month, Robb Report Africa introduces a new editorial series: Atelier Africaine. Conceived as a tribute to the sanctuaries where vision becomes value, Atelier Africaine takes readers into the creative studios and intimate spaces across Africa and the diaspora where luxury is born. Ateliers are crucibles of culture, where ancestral memory and contemporary expression converge. Through profiles, films, and essays, the series celebrates the makers who are redefining African artistry for the global stage.
For our inaugural feature, we turn to South Africa and to an artist whose story is as rare and resilient as the clay he shapes: Nicholas Sithole. Born in 1964 in Mkhondo, Mpumalanga, Sithole first witnessed the sculptural language of clay at his grandmother’s side. By the early 1980s, he was working full-time with ceramics in Johannesburg, quietly mastering a craft that would remain largely undocumented for decades. For thirty years, Sithole built vessels for other potters, only beginning to sign works under his own name in 2007. What emerged was not mere pottery, but a distinct voice within the canon of South African ceramics, marked by hand-built forms, carved motifs, and innovations on the traditional Zulu bull motif.
A perfectionist to the point of scarcity, Sithole destroys anything less than flawless. The few works that survive today are treasured in the Pretoria Art Museum, the Nelson Mandela Museum, Iziko Museum and in private collections in South Africa and abroad.
Sithole’s return to the contemporary art world comes through Art Formes, the first African gallery dedicated exclusively to contemporary African sculpture. Founded in 2021 by Sorbonne-trained art historian Olivia Barrell, Art Formes has already become a pioneering voice on African clay, with Barrell having published the landmark volume Clay Formes and curating exhibitions that elevate overlooked mediums.
Barrell herself spent years tracking down Sithole after stumbling upon one of his works on Google. The image sparked a deep curiosity and her pursuit led to the rediscovery of a master who had been hiding in plain sight. Today, Art Formes represents Sithole, placing his ceramics within the global conversation on contemporary African art.
To mark Sithole’s reintroduction, Robb Report Africa commissioned a short film directed by Cape Town based filmmaker Haneem Christian, whose practice frames Pan African history through the lens of community. Christian, a winner of the Pride Photo Award and the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, brings their unique eye for narrative justice to Sithole’s story. Framing it with the considered care and reverence it deserves.
The film unfolds across three contrasting locations. In Mamelodi, Pretoria, inside the artist’s own studio, clay, tools, and the atmosphere of daily practice reveal the intimacy of the artist’s process. Inside the Art Formes gallery in Woodstock, Cape Town, Sithole’s works inhabit the pristine white cube of contemporary exhibition culture. Then, in a deliberate counterpoint, the camera follows his ceramics into the centuries-old, award-winning gardens of The Cellars-Hohenort in Constantia, a Small Luxury Hotels of the World property whose horticultural legacy stretches back 300 years.
Together, these spaces form a triptych: the private sanctuary of making, the public stage of art, and the living theatre of nature because clay is not an abstract medium for Sithole, it is material drawn directly from the earth. The gardens, alive with roses, indigenous flora, and ancient camphor trees, become a stage where his vessels converse with the very soil that birthed them. The contrast underscores the harmony and tension between tradition and innovation, nature and culture, obscurity and recognition.
Through Nicholas Sithole, Atelier Africaine begins its journey. His story embodies the essence of the series: The atelier as a place of solitude, discipline, and transformation. It is in such spaces, whether clay-strewn studios, fashion workshops, or culinary kitchens, that Africa’s luxury future is being authored.
We invite you to watch the short film that introduces Sithole as the master ceramicist who is also a keeper of indigenous memory in a most contemporary way.
Welcome to Atelier Africaine.
Contact Olivia Barrell at Art Formes to enquire about acquiring one of Nicholas Sithole’s rare artworks.
Film Credits:
Director: Haneem Christian
Producer: Ntokozo Maseko
DOP: Sokhaya Mbiko @sokhaya
Camera Assist: Shak Toefy
Editor: Naeem Dxvis
Colourist: Tash Toefy
Original Score: Riad Abji
Sound Design and score weaving: Denise Onen
Wardrobe: Azeez Jacobs
Nicholas Sithole dressed by: Tshepo Jeans & Rockport Shoes
Grooming/Make-up: Tasneem Van Der Schyff
Ntokozo Maseko has never been one to wait her turn. At 25, she became the youngest editor in the history of South Africa’s heritage title BONA, steering the four-language magazine into the digital era and winning the title a Thetha Masombuka Award for linguistic excellence along the way. Named one of the Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans, she has since built a 17-year career shaping the voice of iconic brands across luxury, lifestyle, and culture.
Her editorial eye has graced various mastheads; from a legacy print title, an innovative digital magazine to a pan African luxury platform. Today, as inaugural Editor-in-Chief of Robb Report Africa, Ntokozo curates a world where African excellence meets global luxury, telling the stories of the continent’s most remarkable people, places, and creations with precision, wit, and unapologetic style.
