Ode to Metal Guilds 2024 Collection

Early South African metal guilds were formed by ‘izinyanga’ skilled craft healers in isiZulu language. These guilds included craft specialist families that consisted of metalsmiths who made jewellery and domestic ornaments for local clans and communities. Guilds enabled South African jewellery designing families to nurture the trade of metal work within the family. Jewellery production became a way of organising society, establishing hierarchy and roles based on the types of metals and designs that different people were allowed to wear. This delineation also extended to people and families. Certain metalworkers had the right to work only black metal like iron whilst others were allowed to work the red and white metals like copper, brass. The existence of practice based guilds in South Africa shows this region’s organisational interest in metal based cultural production. This collection is dedicated to the memory of metal traditions of beauty, disappeared histories of how early metalsmiths dedicated themselves to metal production as an ecological practice, and way of wearing the earth, coding proximity and kinship to the ground that we walk.