What happens when an artwork needs you as much as you need it? In Juandré van Eck’s Die Vallei van Adem, ceramic sculptures sit silent until a visitor picks them up and sets them in motion. Air is drawn through their chambers, water begins to move, and, almost as if taking a breath, each vessel finds its voice.
Opening at the Pretoria Art Museum on September 10, the immersive exhibition marks Van Eck’s first major solo show and follows his win at the 2025 Sasol New Signatures Visual Arts Competition. It also expands on the ideas behind his winning work, Cycles of the Mind, pushing his experiments with ceramics, sound and audience participation to a much larger scale.
At the heart of the exhibition is a series of ceramic sound vessels, each constructed from two connected chambers. When gently moved, air travels through water inside the sculpture to produce a distinctive sound. The result shifts the ceramic object away from something precious and untouchable and towards something that needs to be handled to be fully experienced.
The vessels have individual voices, but Van Eck has conceived them as an ensemble. Smaller sculptures produce higher notes, while larger forms resonate at lower frequencies. As multiple visitors activate the works, those individual sounds begin to overlap, creating an evolving soundscape that changes according to who is in the room and how they interact with it.
There is something particularly interesting about applying this sense of impermanence to ceramics, a medium so often associated with permanence, preservation and the hand of its maker. Here, the finished object is only the starting point. The audience completes the work, and no two encounters with it can sound quite the same.
“Die Vallei van Adem asks people not to simply look at the work but to activate it,” says Van Eck. “Every interaction gives the sculptures breath and voice, making each visitor part of the artwork itself.”
The exhibition follows a rapid progression for the Gqeberha-based artist. Van Eck received a Merit Award at Sasol New Signatures in 2024 before taking the competition’s top prize with Cycles of the Mind the next year. The annual winner is awarded the opportunity to stage a solo exhibition, giving the artist a platform to develop the ideas and practice recognised by the competition.
For Sasol art curator and New Signatures judge Cate Terblanche, that development is evident in the new body of work. “Juandré’s work demonstrates a remarkable understanding of material, concept and audience engagement,” she says. “He transforms ceramics into something that is not only visually compelling but also deeply experiential.”
Die Vallei van Adem opens alongside the 2026 Sasol New Signatures exhibition, which brings together 123 works selected for this year’s competition. But Van Eck’s exhibition offers something slightly different: a glimpse at what can happen after the prize has been won.
More importantly, it asks visitors to abandon one of the gallery’s most familiar rules: don’t touch. In Die Vallei van Adem, standing back isn’t enough. The work needs your hands, your movement and your presence. Until then, the valley remains silent.
- Die Vallei van Adem and the 2026 Sasol New Signatures exhibition run at the Pretoria Art Museum from September 10 to November 8.
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