A leopard lantern, made by African artists, to Hold the Light for the wilderness, for human creativity, and for the shared humanity that connects us all. As that light ripples outward, so does its impact: one lantern, one artist, one Ripple Fund contribution at a time.

Order your own bespoke Leopard Lantern here.

The Leopards of Londolozi Lantern, Crafted and Created by Ardmore

A tracker crouches over a print in the sand, reading the depth of a pad, the drag of a claw, a flash of rosettes that passed this way at first light.

An artist sits at a wheel in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, coaxing and reading a different story out of a lump of wet clay.

Two ways of being, reading the same continent. This year, they worked together.

“The rarest art forms will be that which cannot be replicated, an art form carried within a human being and made real only through the touch of human hands and lived experience” – Bronwyn Varty-Laburn

A Meeting of Artistry and Wilderness: A Century in the Making

We have known Fée Halsted’s work for longer than either family can quite pin down. Fée founded Ardmore in 1985, on a remote farm in the Midlands, and pieces from her studio have sat in the Londolozi Living Boutique since, though we suspect the truth reaches back further than any invoice can prove. A leopard curled across the belly of a bowl, its spots painted one by one by a hand that has painted ten thousand leopards and still leans in close for every one. A cushion patterned with birds you can name by call alone if you have sat on our decks for long enough. Our guests have carried these pieces home for years, small fired fragments of this place, without always knowing how far they had travelled, or whose hands had shaped them before they ever reached the Sand River. There had even been a quieter thread before any of this: two Ardmore artists once spent time here with us on an Artist in Residency, out in the wilderness at dawn, tracking, watching, letting this particular wilderness settle into their hands before it ever surfaced in her work.

Two Families, One Centenary

It was Ardmore who came to us.

As our hundredth year drew closer, and as the intention to Hold the Light in celebration of our centenary ahead began to take shape around camp, Fée asked if her family might mark our milestone alongside theirs.

There is something we find quietly moving in that. A partner who has known us for years, choosing not simply to celebrate our centenary from a distance, but to put their own hands to it. One family a hundred years in the making, the other closer to forty, standing together at a milestone that, in its own way, now belongs to both.

Two ancient art forms, tracking and ceramics, born of the same instinct: watch closely, wait patiently, and let the land tell you what it wants to become.

That same patience runs through both our histories. Once upon a time, Londolozi was an overgrazed cattle farmland that nobody believed could hold a leopard again, let alone a legacy. Fée built Ardmore the same way, on a farm where nobody believed clay and colour and a handful of students could become a studio the world would collect from. Both of us learned the same lesson, at the same unhurried pace: that patience, given enough seasons, becomes something worth calling a legacy.

“There is a quiet strength in the women who shape a legacy. Ardmore and Londolozi are two distinctly South African luxury brands, bound by a deep respect for one another, a shared reverence for the natural world, and generations of women whose creativity, courage and vision continue to carry our stories forward.” – Fée Halsted, Ardmore Founder 

 

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The Ardmore Story

To understand what this lantern means, you have to sit with where Fée started. In 1985, with a fine art degree and no map for what came next, she began teaching ceramics to a small group of people on that Midlands farm. Her first student was a young woman named Bonnie Ntshalintshali, and what grew between them in that first studio, a sculptor’s instinct meeting a painter’s eye, became the foundation everything else was built on. Within five years, the two of them were being recognised nationally for it.

What we love about Ardmore, all these decades later, is that they never became a factory. It stayed a family, in the truest sense: more than sixty artists working from the same valley in the shadow of the Drakensberg, every single piece the result of at least two hands, often more, a sculptor and a painter each signing their own name to what they made together. The style gives itself away instantly. Intricate. Narrative. Alive with the animals and plants and stories of this part of Africa, painted by people who grew up inside those stories rather than looking at them from outside. Ardmore’s work has travelled into galleries and private collections and the hands of visiting heads of state, and yet it has never really left home. Every piece is still made by artists who know South Africa’s land the way our rangers and trackers know Londolozi’s way, which is precisely why we trust them to carry the story of our leopards.

The Leopard Lantern

Out of that conversation came the piece itself. A lantern built from three images that hold the story of this place: The leopard, the golden fruit of the majestic marula tree, the leopard orchid, each one a thread of Londolozi’s wilderness pulled into clay and light.

The leopard needs no introduction. It is the animal our entire hundred years turns around, the presence that still moves through this reserve more visibly than almost anywhere else on the continent. The golden marula stands for something quieter: shelter, sustenance, a tree that has weathered drought after drought the way our own history has weathered its share of hard seasons and come through gold on the other side. And the leopard orchid, small and easily missed, growing high in the branches of the very trees the leopard moves through, holds the piece to the smaller truths of this place, the ones you only notice once you have learned to slow down and look properly.

Every element passed through several pairs of hands before it became a lantern. Mbali Dlamini drew the original design, the first translation of an idea into line. Lovemore Sithole threw the form on the wheel, giving it shape and weight and the beginnings of a leopard’s stillness. Victor Mtshali sculpted the fine detail into the wet clay, the whiskers, the muscle beneath the spots, the curl of an orchid petal. Siyabonga Mabaso brought it all to life in paint, the last hand, the one that turns clay into something breathing. Four artists, four disciplines, one lantern, lit from within so that the leopard, the tree and the orchid are not merely seen but glow, the way a lantern has always meant something to us here: warmth against the dark, a mark of welcome, a small light held out to whoever is still finding their way home.

“The Mother Leopard changed the story of Londolozi forever, leaving a legacy that continues to live within this remarkable wilderness. Created in her honour, Ardmore’s ceramic lantern holds that story in light. As Londolozi celebrates its centenary and invites us to Hold the Light, this artwork pays tribute to the past while illuminating the legacy we carry into the future.” – Fée Halsted, Ardmore Founder 

A Light That Ripples Outward

There is one more thread woven into this piece, and it may be the most important one. Ten per cent of every Leopard Lantern sold will go directly to the Londolozi Ripple Fund, supporting the Good Work Foundation and Tracker Academy, two organisations working to open doors for young people in the communities that surround this reserve. The Good Work Foundation brings digital learning to rural schools that would otherwise never get access to another way of creative learning and expression. Tracker Academy trains young trackers and guides from these same communities, many of whom go on to spend their working lives doing exactly what opened this story: reading the same signs in the sand that first inspired this lantern.

It is a fitting way for this particular expression to exist in the world. A piece of art, made by hand, inspired by a wild place, that in turn gives something back to the land and the people who inspired it in the first place. The circle closes exactly where it began.

When you light this lantern in your own home, you are lighting more than a room. You are keeping something of Londolozi glowing in yours, and helping to fund the next generation of trackers and artists who will carry these same stories forward long after we are gone.

A leopard lantern, made by African artists, to Hold the Light for the wilderness, for human creativity, and for the shared humanity that connects us all. As that light ripples outward, so does its impact: one lantern, one artist, one Ripple Fund contribution at a time.

Order your own Leopard Lantern here. 

Explore the full Legacy collection here.