In the industrial heart of Woodstock, Cape Town, sculptor Sarah Heinamann shapes stone and bronze into totemic forms that speak to ancient wisdom, while addressing a contemporary feminine experience. The studio, shared with veteran sculptor Otto du Plessis, hums with creative energy — a far cry from the quiet home workspace in Constantia where her pieces are conceptualised.
‘No two days are exactly alike,’ Sarah reflects, describing mornings spent shaping new pieces or wrestling with administrative demands. Two assistants help manage the business side, allowing her to focus on what she calls ‘the constant dance of nurturing these totems into being.’
Her sculptures emerge from contrasting environments. The contemplative studio work contrasts sharply with the foundry where bronze elements are born. ‘The foundry is this wonderfully raw, masculine, and noisy place,’ Sarah explains. ‘It's like stepping into a different element — so much more intense and primal — and then returning to the studio to weave that raw energy and imagination into the finished piece.’
This physicality surprises many who encounter her work’s sacred, almost feminine grace. Although her finished pieces often have a delicate quality, the making is intensely physical. Moving weighty stones requires strength, while drilling, grinding and fitting demand endurance and physical assistance. The totem tradition stretches back millennia, serving as a spiritual marker of protection across cultures, from Aboriginal Australia to Native American communities. For Sarah, the form became a personal compass during life’s most challenging transition. Nine years ago, as her twenty-year marriage ended, a women's retreat meditation revealed her future path. ‘I saw myself as a great oak that had already dropped its acorns,’ she recalls. ‘I understood that a season of my life had completed.’
This revelation birthed four years of bronze seedpod sculptures, works that honoured what she describes as a ‘gestational phase’. The metaphor of the seedpod remains central to her practice: ‘It's in the cracking, the breaking, the decomposing of the pod that new life becomes possible,’ she explains. ‘That moment of surrender allows transformation.’
Today, those bronze seedpods crown her crystal totems, elevated as sacred objects that speak to feminine cycles of ending and beginning. Each sculpture begins with the stones — Sarah’s primary source of inspiration. Sometimes she goes searching with a particular vision in mind, other times an unexpected stone shifts everything.
These materials arrive from across South Africa and beyond, often unrecognisable in their raw state before grinding, polishing, and drilling reveal their potential. Sacred geometry increasingly features in her work through ceramic forms that represent life's primordial blueprint. ‘Out of nothingness comes the first cell, then the next,’ she muses. ‘In that elegant mathematical design lies the very beginning of all life.’
Sarah’s latest collection emerged from a commission for nine large-scale bronze coral pieces for a resort in the Maldives. The nine-month project involved a collaboration with Otto du Plessis and Charles Haupt and a deep immersion in coral forms, filling her studio with shells and sea-inspired shapes. The timing feels particularly relevant as coral reefs face unprecedented threats. Creating these forms in bronze celebrates their beauty whilst protecting endangered species. ‘The challenge and joy have been in taking something small, delicate, almost overlooked, and enlarging it so that we really see it,’ she says.
This oceanic turn reflects her current life phase. With two of three children now independent, her days feel lighter, freer, and more spacious. The vibrant studio community of designers, artists, and sculptors provides constant inspiration, whilst Otto's mentorship offers both privilege and joy.
Sarah’s business acumen balances her artistic vision. Having worked in magazines, led interiors projects, owned a retail store and worked on many artistic endeavours since her Central St Martins days in the 90s, she is no stranger to the practicalities needed in the making and selling of investment art.
Sarah finds her heart-centred approach creates positive ripples across the industry and beyond. ‘The way we truly change the world is by working from the heart,’ she says. She also has an intrinsic understanding that her own success is tied to lifting others, ‘The more work I create, the more people I can employ,’ she says.
Understanding that monumental totems require considerable investment and space, Sarah has simultaneously developed intimate table-top pieces. ‘There is something very charming about them,’ she notes, ‘carrying the same energy and symbolism but in a more approachable scale.’
In her totems, the philosophy of balance is echoed and embodied. The totem itself is a masculine symbol — upright, strong, architectural. Yet, the forms that adorn it are deeply feminine — seedpods, seashells, coral. Each totem becomes an embodiment of duality, a dialogue between masculine and feminine, structural and organic, raw and tender.
In an era when ancient symbols resurface to address contemporary needs, Sarah’s totems are profound markers not just of place, but of transformation. Like the oak that drops its acorns, her sculptures stand as testament to life’s eternal cycles of death and renewal. They remind us that in breaking apart we often find our truest becoming.
Working entirely from intuitive vision, Sarah trusts each piece to reveal its destiny. And with the ocean now calling her creative spirit, she remains open to whatever emerges next. One stone, one vision, one totem at a time.
Credits
Text by Vikki Sleet
Images: Sophie Smith, Elsa Young
