Page 81 - Zimbabwe Stone Sculpure 1st Edition

hENRY MUNYARADZI
“He could see the beauty in the raw material and then carved a subject that suited the natural forms and shapes.”
HENRY MUNYARADZI
Art critic Michael Shepherd, writing in the Sunday Telegraph in 1984, described Henry as “one of the top ten stone sculptors in the world”.
Henry was born in 1931 in Guruve, a mining and farming town in the north of Zimbabwe. He was a cattle herder, a hunter and a labour gang supervisor on a tobacco farm and never went to school. He had no idea about art or sculpture until he had a serendipitous moment in 1967. He was out of work and walking through the hills of the Great Dyke on his way home when he heard the clinking of tools on stone and went to look. He had stumbled across Tengenenge, a tobacco farm turned into a sculpture community by unconventional farmer Tom Blomefield in 1966. He asked if he could join and with Blomefield as his mentor, found he had a natural ability to express himself through stone.
Simplicity was the genius of Henry. He allowed the stone to stimulate him and he therefore chose stone that he turned into art. He could see the beauty in the raw material and then carved a subject that suited the natural forms and shapes. He sculpted instinctively without marking or calculating. The brilliance was that natural forms and subjects were presented in an inventive way that was artistic but also uncomplicated. It could therefore be understood by a Western-orientated public.
In early 1985 he bought a farm in Ruwa, close to Harare, with the proceeds of his sales of his one-man exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute in London in 1984. This is where I met him.
He died in 1998 but he will always be remembered simply as ‘Henry’, and his sculptures ensure his legacy survives.
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