SOUTH AFRICAN ART17 JUL 2026Bronwyn Katz digs beneath the surface to uncover stories held by the landBronwyn Katz, the 2026 Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Arts, creates sculptures and installations that delve…Lesego Chepape6 min read

Fresh from being named a 2026 Standard Bank Young Artist, sculptor Bronwyn Katz reflects on ancestry, Kimberley, memory and why their work asks audiences to slow down rather than search for easy answers For Bronwyn Katz, art does not begin in the studio. It begins around the kitchen table, in stories passed down through generations, in the memory held by the earth and in the quiet language of materials. Recently named the 2026 Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Arts, Katz has built a practice that asks audiences to slow down.

Her sculptures and installations resist instant interpretation, inviting viewers to sit with uncertainty rather than search for immediate answers. Instead of offering fixed meanings, Katz creates space for conversation between the artwork, the material and the person standing before it. Speaking to the Mail & Guardian, Katz says the foundations of her practice were laid long before she studied sculpture at the Michaelis School of Fine Art.

“I grew up around people who loved sharing stories,” she says. “My mother and my grandmother would tell stories about all sorts of things ghosts, people who worked with magic, stories connected to the earth.” Those moments became the blueprint for the artist she would become. Storytelling was never simply entertainment; it was a way of understanding the relationship between people, history and place.

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“My interest in relaying messages and wanting to share information really started there,” she says. Her creative instincts were shaped just as much by making as they were by storytelling. Katz’s father worked as a welder, filling her childhood with metal, tools and handmade objects, while her mother nurtured an appreciation for beauty and ornamentation.

“My father is a metal worker and welder, so I grew up watching him make things out of metal,” she says. “That definitely sparked my curiosity. My mother loved beautiful things, so she informed my aesthetic sensibilities in a different way.” Together, those influences forged an artistic language rooted in both craftsmanship and inherited knowledge.

Although Katz has worked across sculpture, sound and video, sculpture remains the medium that best carries the stories she wants to tell. Those stories are inseparable from Kimberley, the city where she grew up. While Kimberley is often reduced to its history of diamond mining, Katz is interested in histories that stretch far beyond colonial extraction. Her work explores the landscape through ancestral memory, oral histories and family lineage.

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