Viola Greyling

VIOLA GREYLING (1996 -)

Viola Greyling is a practicing ceramic artist. Greyling’s work explores the emotions experienced while being in a liminal space after or during displacement. The artist explores her transforming identity through depicting natural elements such as stalagmite, seeds, and imprints of her current surroundings. Using package material pressed into clay the artist depicts her search for belonging. By using documentation of spaces in her past as memories on the surface of her ceramics, the artist creates ceramic sculptures that represent a shedding process. A process necessary in dealing with change and difference. The textures, colours and shapes used depict the hybrid identity that inhabits the artist.

Born in Pretoria, where she currently lives and works, Greyling received a National Diploma (2018) and a Bachelor of Technology (2019), both cum laude, in Fine and Applied Art from Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria. In 2023 the artist graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from the University of Pretoria. The Artist placed in the Top 100 for both the Thami Mnyele Fine Art Awards and the Sasol New Signatures Competitions (2022). Greyling has participated in multiple group exhibitions including Star Sailors at the Viewing Room, Pretoria (2019); Kinesphere at Johann van Heerden Art Gallery, Pretoria (2020) and An Experiential Musshero(i)ns at Trent Gallery, Pretoria (2022). Solo exhibitions include her Masters show Transforming at the University of Pretoria Student Gallery (2022).