Magda van der Vloed is a prolific, multifaceted artist in the contemporary South African art scene. 

She was raised in the quaint town of Jan Kempdorp in the Northern Cape, where her passion for creating was sparked by her father’s innovative creativity. This led to a life pursuing the need to use what surrounds her to make works inspired by her own personal narrative, as well as offering commentary on the contentious socio-political atmosphere of South Africa. She went on to channel this burning desire to forge objects from her imagination into the world of ceramics, which she majored while studying Fine Arts at the University of Technology in Pretoria. She now practises ceramics in a studio situated in the beautiful village of Rosendal in the Eastern Free State.

Her early works focused mainly on production, and thus fell into the commercialised aesthetic category. Moving past this, she found her own voice by treating the surface of whatever she was creating as a canvas, on which her thoughts and feelings are projected.

During 2019 to 2020, Magda explored the role of figurative ceramics through history and in a contemporary context. She embraced functionality and preferred to work producing a series of a chosen subject. In 2021 she started to work in a different and much more difficult medium: Porcelain. She started to hand throw tall porcelain ‘spires’ on the wheel and treat the clay surface as a canvas.  Magda depicts the vices of our society, as well as the ecological abuses of nature by corporations and government, in order to draw the viewer’s attention to how we are living in a perilous and precarious time. She has a keen interest in the written word and often incorporates one-liners or thoughts in a satirical yet with bone-cutting honesty into her work.