Page 37 - Zimbabwe Stone Sculpure 1st Edition

3The sculptures
“Where did it come from? The imagination. This is what happens with sculpture: the imagination meets the stone, the tools fly, and there is a sculpture.”
CELIA WINTER-IRVING, NEW VISIONS IN STONE, 2003
The inspiration
The majority of the well-known sculptors belong to the Shona tribe; hence the old name for the art was Shona sculpture. The Shona are a gentle, peace-loving people with a complex culture in which the spirit world, magic and witchcraft play an important role. They believe everything has a spirit including trees and animals. Mwari is the name of their God and, like the Christian God, he created the world. However, he tends to be aloof and to guide them through their daily lives they turn to their ancestral spirits who also act as a go-between with Mwari. Each family has a totem, which represents an animal, and in the spirit world ancestors take the form of this animal.
These beliefs have been handed down from generation to generation orally in the form of stories. Since so much in their lives is symbolic, their stories tend to be as well. A lot of these stories are about animals with human characteristics and they are used to give people guidelines for a good life. The tortoise, for instance, is used to explain wisdom because it never leaves its shell behind and carries it with it wherever it goes, so we must carry our knowledge with us wherever we go.
In rural communities like Tengenenge, and among older artists, these beliefs are still quite strong. Therefore their sculptures often depict spirits or other strange forms related to magic or the spirit world. This is true of artists like Lazarus Takawria. Most of the younger urban artists have been exposed to other ideas through education and access to the wider world and therefore acquire most of their inspiration from there. Consequently their sculpture can be easier to relate to because it is less abstract in meaning and in form.
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