adminStephen Garan’anga : Visual Art
When high speed passenger trains takeoff from opposite directions mistakenly on the same line their collision is disastrous, but when childhood memories torment an artistically talented young adult’s mind the collision is wonderful. Art enables what is deeply concealed to be revealed to the surface, the immense pressure trapped inside to gush out and brings relief to the agonized.Relief and storytelling is what a former farm girl Pamela Bentley felt when her fine art talent collided head on with her early life to result in what is “deeply woven” and wonderful. As all artists live in the reflection of objects, the expressions of her upbringing environment dripped a few tears from some former commercial farmers who were in attendance at the opening of Pamela’s debut solo art exhibition recently.
“I grew up in Guruve about a 30-minute drive from the renowned Tengenenge Sculpture Park on my parents’ tobacco farm. I have vivid memories of the various activities at the farm especially my mother weaving and spinning in her weaving room,” she gave me an insight.
Can you spin? And how did you come up with the theme “Rooted and Woven” for your first solo exhibition? I curiously enquired from the upcoming artist as she gave me a walkabout of her earthly work at “The Corridor”.
“No I can’t spin, I have tried but I do weave as you can see on the other piece, ‘Woven Red Rust’. I’m now between Cape Town and Harare as my parents are no longer at the farm and I have just graduated from Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town. The exhibition is about my memories of the land, tobacco leaves, dislocation and growth. My mother’s weaving room and the woven things that filled my home. Like the leaves – I was grown from the land. Like the canvases, like the wool, I am stained, steeped in memories that dye me, change me, colour me. Through this making; through remembering there is catharsis. Here I am rooted and woven,” she expressed.
Pamela’s work is quite refreshing not only because she is a new artist offering something varying from what we have become accustomed to at some of our traditional art spaces, but it surprises and intrigues the audience with its unique sparse application of limited natural brownish and yellow ochre earth colours as well as tobacco greens in her abstract oil paintings on canvas. Their appearing effect proposes as if they have been in existence much longer than the artist and this was vivid in the gorgeous pieces which included “Rooted: Grading Shed”, “Rooted; Memory of a land” and “Rooted: Cured”.
There is also variety of technique in her work as was illustrated in a three part series of “Gold Leaf” on paper in glass that gave a flare to the meditated wide use of ramazol dyes in yellow-gold, whilst hanging constructions “Ramazol – Dyed Canvas” in a double series bore aged looking hanging pieces of dyed canvases in mono colours of olive green, yellow-gold and red rust ramazol intermingling with hanging and dripping natural yellow tobacco leaves. “Woven: Red Rust”, the only handmade vertical loom with woven strips of red rust dyed canvas enclosed in a glass frame summed up the exhibition on clean off-white walls barely a hundred and fifty centimetres apart of about a fifteen meter length passage called “The Corridor Gallery”. There was also an elegant artist’s hand bound catalogue on the show to order.
“The Corridor” is a young exhibiting space within Sorellas at 1Fisher Avenue, Borrowdale in Harare founded by artist Helen Teede. She says the small art space is intended to target solo exhibitions by upcoming artists as well as collaborations. This comes at a critical period where the nation is in need of more art spaces to provide platforms to the ever growing number of artists’ longing to showcase their creativity. The country’s visual art landscape is now full of activity despite the harsh economic environment and constricted art business transactions. ‘Rooted and Woven’ was indeed a perfect takeoff to an artistic journey of an innocent practitioner which can be as exhilarating, but also a travel of bumpy paths which always bear twists and turns which inflict excruciating pain to a practitioner’s way of living.
Online Reporter