Cynthia Edwards
Cynthia Edwards is the artist and maker behind Gwyn Studios, based in Cape Town, South Africa. Guided by childhood memories, nostalgia, and the simplicity of connecting with vast open spaces, she is fascinated by the delicate balance between fragility and movement, light and shadow. Her work aims to evoke a sense of play and wonder and engage the viewers curiosity through these contrasts and contradictions.
After earning her BFA in Printmaking from the University of Cape Town in 2010, Edwards moved to Taiwan, where she explored woodblock printmaking using locally available materials. Her craft eventually drew her back to South Africa in 2014, where she launched a small business dedicated to hand-printing fabrics.
Long fascinated by ceramics, she took her first pottery class shortly after turning 30 and gradually transitioned to working with clay full-time. In 2022, she officially returned to the art world with the launch of Gwyn Studio, an artist-run ceramic art studio in Cape Town. Under this banner, she has cultivated her own artistic practice, creating ceramic vessels, dynamic wall pieces, and suspended mobiles. She also collaborates with fellow artists, developing an ongoing series of innovative, co-created works.
Artist Statement for Head Under Water
The Head Under Water exhibition is a meditation on movement, transience, and the fleeting impression of the body in space. Inspired by photographic imagery that captures figures suspended in water or motion, this body of work seeks to translate that ephemeral quality into the language of ceramics. Through the interplay of form, texture, and colour, I aim to evoke a sense of weightlessness and fluidity—moments of fluid motion captured in an fragile, brittle medium.
For this exhibition, I have created a series of vessels designed to juxtapose with the works of fellow artists, fostering a dialogue between shape, tone, and composition. The vessels, though grounded in their materiality, embody soft undulations and organic silhouettes that echo the distortions of the body in water. Alongside these, my ceramic wall pieces serve as abstract landscapes—2D impressions of movement rendered in clay. These works seek to explore fluidity, not only in form but in perception, inviting the viewer to engage with the shifting tensions between solidity and impermanence.
Each piece within Head Under Water is a reflection on the delicate balance between presence and dissolution, the seen and the obscured. This work invites contemplation of our physical impact, the marks we make, and the inevitable erosion of time. It speaks to a notion of “permanent impermanence”—the paradox of existence where every trace we leave is both fleeting and significant, a quiet echo of our being.
