Senzo Duma Ceramics

A Red Panda, Born in Africa

Ed Pascoe has spent years walking the studios of South Africa, and this year he arrived with a question instead of a wish list. He asked the artists of Senzo Duma Ceramics which animals might resonate with collectors in the United States. Then he took the same question to a friend of his, the director of the Nashville Zoo, who answered with a list of the species that draw the biggest crowds in American zoos. Almost none of them had ever passed through the studio's hands.

The red panda sat near the top of that list. It lives in the high mountain forests of Asia, a world away from South Africa, and while it is one of the most adored animals in American zoos, it is very rare in the wild. No one at the studio had ever sculpted one. Senzo Duma took the challenge.

These are artists who grew up modelling the animals outside their own windows: leopards, pangolins, giraffes, zebras. A red panda asked something different of them. The russet coat, the masked face, the heavy ringed tail, all of it had to be studied from photographs and then translated into clay and glaze in a studio on the other side of the world. The sculpting and the painting answered in kind.

Phomotso Mafura sculpted the vase and Mlungisi Vilakazi painted it in 2025. It stands fourteen inches high. The panda perches at the top among sculpted buds that circle the shoulder, its tail curling down the vessel. Broad painted leaves wrap the body beneath it. Zulu patterning circles the base, and the leopard patterning that runs through the body returns in green at the rim, the studio's signature carried into new territory.

Ed tells the story himself, on camera at the gallery in North Miami, from the Nashville list to the piece on the table in front of him. Watch the full video on the piece's page.