It was just by chance that artist Andries Botha stumbled on the collection of sculptor Mary Stainbank’s works.
It happened at the centenary exhibition for the Natal Art School where Stainbank was a lecturer in the 1950s. Botha, former head of the sculpture department at the Durban University of Technology, went to the exhibition and spotted the “little work”, called Effort. It is a marble figure of a woman of about 30cm tall.
“In all of my exposure to SA art sculpture I’d never heard her name,” he says now. “So then I discovered that she was in fact a very pre-eminent sculptress.”
Stainbank was born in 1899, and the sculpture was created in the 1960s. It is an “extraordinary sculpture that was, in my opinion, way ahead of anything I’d physically seen. It is one of the first feminist works in SA art history.”
His interest piqued, he traced Stainbank, then in her 80s, to a care home in Pinetown and spent the next two to three years visiting her every week until her death at the age of 89 in 1996. She was confined to a wheelchair, crippled by arthritis, with frozen hands, the result of her years of sculpting. For Botha it was only “subsequent to knowing Mary I understood how she really struggled to manifest herself in a world that was exclusively controlled by men”.
He says that all of her works, apart from the commissioned works, depicted the female body, the “encapsulation and the freedom of the female body”, made long before the politicisation of the women’s movement.
His visits to her became a pilgrimage. “I was constantly conscious that you stand in the line of many people. You don’t stand alone, though you do articulate something of yourself. It was me reconnecting to part of myself, literally. We have a long tradition of shared legacy and empathy, particularly creative people.”
She told him that her large body of work was in her original studio. He made his way to Coedmore Castle, the family home, in the Durban suburb of Yellowwood Park, where he found the works stored in the old stable that had been her studio, covered with dust, this “incredible body of work”.
Stainbank was born at Coedmore, studied art at the Durban School of Art, then moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art for four years. She studied bronze foundry work in London too. She returned to Durban and set up her studio at Coedmore. She served in World War 2, then taught sculpture at the art school for 12 years.
Botha compiled a catalogue of her work and toured it around the country. “I got eminent women art historians involved, scripting a text to put her back into history.”
Her entire body of work was catalogued and put on display at the Voortrekker Museum in Pietermaritzburg. “She had been struggling to speak about the feminine all the time, in a world that didn’t have a place for her.”
But 1994 brought different priorities, and Stainbank’s sculptures were put in boxes and sent back to her studio to be exhibited. “The work slowly started to deteriorate, the family didn’t really know what to do.” After trying to interest various parties, they approached Botha. Before he could act, five bronzes were stolen from the studio. He felt the work had to be put into private hands urgently, and he found a saviour in the form of Renee and Iain Gilbert, who embraced the idea. They financed the transport of the work to their farm and nature reserve, Milorho Lodge, in the Magaliesberg. “This is where their strength is, as an instrument in all of this creativity.”
Milorho means “place of dreams”, and there are plenty of dreams being realised in the bushveld. Once Stainbank’s work was installed in the chapel at Milorho in 2024, the Gilberts invited Botha to display his work in their bushveld sculpture park. Unlike Nirox or the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, where the grounds are perfectly arranged, visitors to Milorho can stroll through an area of bush around a small dam and admire the work of Anton Smit, Simon Zitha, James Delaney, and Botha, among other artists.
Botha is an accomplished sculptor who has exhibited across SA, and in Europe, the US and UK, Mexico, India and Iceland. He taught sculpture in Durban for 30 years.
In 2006 he was invited by the Beaufort Art Project in Belgium to participate in a prestigious sculpture competition. It took a year to complete the nine life-size elephants to be placed on a beach, entitled You can buy my heart and my soul. Botha admits to never having made an elephant before, but he immersed himself in them. “Elephants carry memory, migratory creatures, they link ancestral memory to contemporary memory, that’s what I was interested in.” At high tide the front elephant stood in the sea up to its chest — they were walking into the sea, back to Africa, he explains. Their sturdy metal frame is covered in wooden tiles. It was voted the most popular work of art in Belgium that year.
They remained on the beach for six months until sold, and now reside in a forest in Belgium.
In 2008 he established the Human Elephant Foundation. Between 2006 and 2024 he has created 30 elephants that have been placed around SA and the world. He sees the elephants as “creative metaphors to focus our need to pay attention to pressing ecological issues”, he writes on his website.
“Hundreds of thousands of people responded to these elephants. It was as if the elephants had the capacity to cross multiple boundaries of discussion that was quite sophisticated, from the pure celebration to joy to the role of the artwork within the public space to the conservation metaphor, to issues of migration and overpopulation, to issues of recycling, to issues of co-existence and tolerance,” he states on the foundation website. You enter the debate “through people’s joy and sense of wonderment to be in the presence of a life-size elephant, which happened to also be a work of art. It is the most powerful ancestral symbol in Africa.”
Botha, together with Iain Gilbert and Ernest Ngcobo, has completed a larger-than-life-size elephant to be placed this year among ancient boulders on a hilltop at Milorho.
It has game, hikes, rock pools and waterfalls, and plentiful birdlife. Iain drove me around the farm, stopping occasionally to nip off a fragrant blossom of wild fruit or herb for me to smell.
“People arrive here stressed, [but] by the time they leave on Sunday you’re dealing with a different client, that’s what I want to have come through in the sculptures,” said Renee.
“Our aim is a beautiful piece of bushveld, its streams, its rocks, its trees. For many people it’s their first exposure to sculpture.”
As I left, I chatted briefly to visitors in a neighbouring cottage. I asked why they chose Milorho. The answer — for the art and the bushveld. The dream is being realised.
- The 400ha Milorho Lodge is two-and-a-half hours from Joburg. It has six stone cottages of various sizes, plus 10 Africamps glamping tents. Davie was hosted by Milorho Lodge.
