Dominic Pretorius

Dominic Pretorius is a ceramicist whose work is focused on funerary urns as simultaneously functional, aesthetic and sacred objects.

For his debut solo show in 2023, A Room Full of Urns, Pretorius presented twenty-eight lidded urns in a minimalist style. The installation was accompanied by Symphony of Grief, a chorus of multiple voices – cut-and spliced from a series of interviews with strangers, family and friends – that explored personal experience of grief.

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For his second solo show in 2024, his first with Vela Projects, Pretorius presented Urn Burial. The exhibition title referenced Hydriotaphia: Urn-Burial, an essay written in 1658 by the esoteric English author Sir Thomas Browne, inspired by the discovery of several dozen ancient burial urns in Norfolk. The essay is a confrontation with the smallness of human history within the immeasurable bounds of time, and becomes a swirling meditation on the inscrutable meaning of life and the mystery of the afterlife. Pretorius uses this as a point of departure to take his practice beyond the personal to consider matters of life and death on existential and mythological levels. The exhibition consisted of nineteen urns, glazed with a stark metallic finish, that appeared half-buried in stark black gravel that blanketed the gallery floor. Certain of Pretorius’ urns have white figurines – a major departure from his debut show – which erupt from the cylindrical forms thrown on the wheel. These eruptions can be thought of as the souls of those who have departed, or who may still arrive.

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For the artist, memory and voice are constant themes in his work. As the artist puts it, “my desire is to represent how the individual and collective dead remain present and speak to us in memory and spirit.” In both material and concept, Pretorius’ ceramics are attuned to death and its remains, approaching subjects of grief and processes of dying with reverence.

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Dominic Pretorius was born in 1996 in Howick, South Africa. Currently, he lives and works in Cape Town. In 2023, A Room Full of Urns, his first solo exhibition, premiered at the artist’s personal studio and has since been shown at the GUS Gallery and Marvol Gallery. His second solo exhibition Urn Burial was presented at Vela Projects in 2024. His work has been shown at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair (2023) and RMB Latitudes Art Fair (2024), and has been included in various group exhibitions, including Persistence of Memory, Spier Wine Farm (2024), Full House, blank projects (2023), Ten of Cups, 66 Plein Street (2023), Slip Stream, Gallery De MoveOn (2022), HELLMOUTH, 51 Buitenkant Street (2022) and Bluet, KSSO (2021).