African soul artist celebrated

THE Eastern Cape has many wonderful artists and Alexandria-based sculptor Maureen Quin, who turns 80 this year, must surely be one of the most passionate, prolific and respected.

Last week she visited Port Elizabeth's GFI Gallery to launch a gorgeous hardcover book containing images and notes of a lifetime of sculptures, drawings and paintings, carefully chosen and catalogued for a new exhibition.

Quin and co-writer Virginia Reed put together the volume to accompany "Quin, the Retrospective Year", which is touring the country, and it is a magnificent reflection of her working life, aptly titled: Maureen Quin Master Sculptor: Six Decades of Sculptural Excellence.

The dedication pays tribute to her late husband, Etienne du Plessis, "who had absolute faith in my ability" as those who remember him can testify. I, for one, remember visiting the famed Quin Sculpture Garden under his careful supervision; he was indeed her most ardent publicist and obviously is still very much missed.

However, Quin's artistry started long before she met Du Plessis and continues to this day. Since first sitting on the banks of the Renoster Spruit in the 1940s, and crudely making a female figure from river-bank clay, Quin has been shaping clay and other materials to her purpose.

She began her art career in 1954 and after 60 years is still creating powerful works. Last year, for example, she was commissioned to do a portrait of Nelson Mandela – not her first call to sculpt the late president, and she has already completed the commission – for a garden of 20th century peace icons in Australia.

Her sensual and etiolated figures, often cast in tactile bronze, may have been inspired by modernists like Henry Moore but they often are of uniquely African subjects such as the Hunt Series in the 1990s. As art historian Muller Ballot writes in the forward, her oeuvre "reflects the soul of Africa so intuitively well while also drawing on her European heritage".

Then there are the commercial commissions also – such as the bronze of golfer Jack Nicklaus cast in 2007 for Simola Golf Estate in Knysna.

The travelling exhibition has already opened at Bloemfontein's Oliewenhius Art Museum – significant, as the artist was born in the Free State and schooled at Eunice before she moved to Potchefstroom, which has many of her sculptures. Next month the exhibition moves to the Belville Gallery and early next year it heads to Pretoria before returning to the Eastern Cape to open to the public in Port Elizabeth.

It will be a visual treat to soak in the range of Quin's work as it has unfolded. But art lovers do not have to wait that long to read the book: it is on sale at Fogarty's book shop in Walmer Park Shopping Centre for R600, and a leather bound collector's edition also has been published. - Gillian McAinsh

• Further information from Fogarty's or Dorothy du Plessis,