Marieke Prinsloo-Rowe grew up on a farm near the diamond mining town of Cullinan. It was here that she became interested in art, creating and re-interpreting materials from an early age. She remembers sitting on the banks of a small stream and building imaginary cities and their people from the red mud, and recalls being on the floor in her mother’s ceramic studio and pressing fingerprints into a ball of clay, entranced by the malleability.

Marieke completed a BA Honours in Fine Arts at the University of Pretoria, graduating in 1999. She is currently in the process of completing her Masters in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 1997, Marieke received a merit award in the Sasol New Signatures art competition, as well as second place in the PPC Cement Young Concrete Sculptor Awards. She went on to win the PPC Cement Young Concrete Sculptor Award in 1999. She has completed numerous commissions and her work is represented in the Johannesburg Art Gallery as well as in several public sites, private collections and galleries.

The primary focus and preoccupation of Marieke’s body of work is and has been an exploration of the female form. She is intrigued by the way in which sculpture mimics the three dimensionality of a human presence and thus the slightly surreal dialogue it invites – human to human look-alike. She also loves the capacity that sculpture has to freeze the transient into sculpted reality keeping it “alive” long after moments and persons have changed