Shirley Cloete
| Artist Name: | Shirley Cloete |
| Nationality: | South African |
| Year of birth: | 1921 |
| Year of death: | 2010 |
| Artist information: | Shirley Cloete was a pioneering South African glass artist and a dedicated anti-apartheid activist. Born on 19 January 1921 on Glendower Farm near Johannesburg to Colin Bain Marais and Dinkie Cullinan, she became involved in the Black Sash during the 1950s while raising a family in Cape Town. Following her divorce in 1961, Cloete studied design at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, where she discovered a passion for glass as an expressive medium. In 1974 she travelled to London to train in glass-blowing under Annette Meech, returning home to establish one of South Africa’s first independent glass studios at her family farm in Somerset West. Her work drew inspiration from the underwater landscapes of Danger Point, capturing shifting colour, light and movement in hand-blown and worked glass. Cloete emerged as a leading figure in the country’s studio glass movement, achieving both national and international recognition. Her sculptures have been commissioned for prominent public sites, and in 2005 one of her works was selected by the Corning Museum of Glass in New York for New Glass Review 27. Her practice often reflected values aligned with her activism, transparency, renewal and social transformation, through her experimental use of glass, light and surface. She continued working from her Somerset West studio until her death on 3 November 2010. Cloete’s legacy lives on through the collections that preserve her work and the artists who followed in the path she helped forge. |
