Citation for Maureen Quin
Honorary graduand, Rhodes University, 25 March 2026
By Professor Siphokazi Magadla
“Necks are important to me. The way you hold your head tells everybody how you are feeling.” No wonder Maureen Quin was chosen to create the sculpture that represents the feelings of those who perished during the 1985 Duncan Village massacre. Her Xhosa warrior sculpture stands resolute, their neck held up high looking towards freedom.
Maureen Quin’s 1972 sculpture of King Mgolombane Sandile Ngqika sits above his grave at the Isidenge military camp in the foothills of the Amatola Mountains. His family commissioned her to create a bust that restores dignity to the hero of the nine frontier wars fought by amaXhosa against British conquest.
Maureen Quin has been thinking about the human form since she started working as a sculptor in 1954. The shy girl who grew up on a farm in Bloemfontein obtained a bursary to study at the School of Fine Arts in Durban. Another bursary at the Royal College of Art in London ensured that she mastered different techniques, especially her approach to modelling “building up carefully on a metal armature, layer by layer, like muscle on bone”. She believes that a sculpture is like building a house. It must be built from the ground up and be structurally sound.
Her trip to Paris in 1987 marks a turning point in her artistry and identity as an African. In Europe, she could not relate to the artwork that she found to be soulless. She returned to South Africa committed to create art that reveals our closeness to the earth, and the inevitable troubles of a continent freeing itself. From this point, we see the attention she gives to people and animals.
It is with her part human, part something else, that she made her most stinging critiques. Using non-literal, hybrid forms she is able to expose and express uncomfortable truths about relationships between people and the planet.
In the “The Hunt Series”, she portrays the fatal intimacy of the hunter and the hunted. The neck is a central device used to show man’s pride, arrogance, pain, remorse and repentance for assumed superiority over all living species.
In 2017, she exhibited the series at various centers in Germany, and on Freedom Day, she exhibited it at the South African Embassy in Berlin, at the special request of the ambassador, Stone Sizane, who hails from Alexandria, the small town that Maureen calls home.
Maureen Quin has produced over 200 works, holding over 40 solo exhibitions since 1962. In the Ballet Dancers, she leans into the joys, sensuality of the human form with figures that take flight.
She has been commissioned to create a bust of Nelson Mandela three times. One of those bronze portraits was for the World Peace Icons courtyard at the University of New South Wales in Australia, and the other watches over students at the Nelson Mandela Hall at Rhodes University.
In 1990, she was awarded with the Silver Medal for her contribution to Sculpture in South Africa by the University of Pretoria. In 2000, the Eastern Cape Government recognised her with the Arts and Culture Award for her contribution to the arts in the Eastern Cape. When she turned 80 in 2014, exhibitions were held in her honour in her hometown in Bloemfontein, Cape Town, Potchefstroom, Pretoria and Gqeberha.
A limited-edition coffee table book, “Maureen Quin: Sixty Years of Excellence”, was produced by her peers to celebrate her enduring influence. In 2016, she received the Medal of Honour for Visual Art from the South African Academy of Science and Culture.
For almost three decades, art lovers in the Eastern Cape have had a front row seat to Maureen’s work which is housed at the famous Quin Sculpture Garden and Gallery in Alexandria. Her sculptures, paintings and sketches on display there allow the viewer to appreciate the forms in her home and work space – rising from the earth, and adorning the walls of a garage -turned-gallery.
Her followers say that her art “reflects the soul of Africa so intuitively well while also drawing on her European heritage”.
In the hands of the sculptor, we can trace civilisations, the loves, joys and courage of those who came before us, from foothills of the Amatola Mountains to Duncan Village.
Mr Chancellor, on this month of her 92nd birthday, I have the honour to request you to confer on Maureen Quin the degree of Doctor of Laws (honoris causa).