If you’re an artist short on ideas, excitement or if you’re quite simply an arts student at Unam, whatever is in the water at the College of the Arts (Cota) is well worth pouring down your throat.
From sculpture to textiles to paintings and mono prints, plenty of what there is to see at ‘ArtSplash’ is meticulously made and entirely engaging.
Take Tafadzwa Gatsi. A stirring sculptor who has crafted over 13 pieces and presented them at the Katutura Community Arts Centre (KCAC) in a collection of faces so fine and faithful to the human form one feels certain he has created his own race of diminutive people.
Each molded in clay and retaining their earthy tones, Tafadzwa’s women and children decry physical abuse while a series titled ‘Tribute to Single Mothers’ celebrates women with a small child’s head on an elongated and textured block fashioned into a trophy.
His reverence for women can also be seen in ‘King of Mothers’. A beautiful sculpture of a regal African woman who seems to watch over all Tafadzwa’s people with a burning intensity replete with battle scars etched into her lovely face.
Not solely a sculptor, Tafadzwa is also at the top of the pile when it comes to pencil on paper. Creating fantastic images of beautiful African women who have pegs for bodies or trees growing right through them, Tafadzwa creates a striking supernatural Africa with immense skill and imagination.
Ever elegant, relevant and able to create in the spheres of sculpture, jewellery, illustration and mixed media, Tafadzwa is a multi-skilled and incredibly gifted artist who is certainly one of the most exciting young creatives working in Namibia today.
Also skilled in sculpture is Lesley Tjiriange.
Dissimilar to Tafadzwa in that his focus is on animals rather than humans, Lesley creates arresting depictions of wildebeest heads and elephant’s feet fashioned into ashtrays. These more decorative pieces are accompanied by conservation –conscious offerings like a rhino horn with a gold tip in the fashion of a bullet as well as a piece titled ‘The Battle’ which presents a man and an elephant standing up right presumably wrestling each other to the death.
Though Tafadzwa and Lesley are the standouts in sculpture, Cota must be commended for all the incredible three-dimensional work exhibited in ‘ArtSplash’. With an array of arresting sculptures fashioned from clay and papier-mâché, it is clear that this is a section that is being nurtured at the college with thrilling results.
Moving from sculpture to watercolour, one must mention Trianus Nakale who merges insects with locomotives to create odd surrealist transportation devices chugging under whirled clouds. Marvelously imaginative and meticulous, Trianus’ locomotives are a pleasing blur of fantasy and reality in the striking tradition of surrealism.
Bringing one back to reality is John M Kalunda who presents mixed media pieces depicting informal settlements replete with corrugated iron embellishments. Though his pieces are wonderfully blended, textured and aesthetically pleasing, his collection of shacks gain a critical element in a three-dimensional dilapidated shack with the erf number 2030 and titled ‘New Life in Vision 2030’.
In terms of drawing, Ilovu Homateni is the illustrator who shines. Creating larger than life drawings of starving children drinking water or with hands outstretched, Ilovu’s sobering murals are both skillfully drawn, socially conscious and incredibly touching.
Though men seem to be the ones at which to marvel, Sunya Beukes is in the front for the females in her tattoo style images which dominate the room through her wonderful use of colour. Her textiles are similarly colourful and feminine but, perhaps, her most interesting piece is ‘Close’ a large painting that depicts a woman and her baby with a tiger emerging from the mother’s hair. The tattoo and somewhat punk aesthetic in her pieces is punchy, refreshing and slightly subversive.
Making masks is Petrus Shiimi who creates two artworks depicting Sam Nujoma and titled ‘The Legendary’. The more interesting of the two pieces is a large mask of the founding father’s face which Shiimi fashions with hair, a white beard and two peep holes for eyes. A functional piece for Independence Day celebrations, meticulously made.
For the photographers, Isack Kapembe stands out in his photographs of rocks and feathers. Rendered in black and white and highlighted by a stark white background, Kapembe’s photographs are of note in a photography exhibition that is not overly exciting but does have some interesting collections like a series of animal skulls taken by various first year students.
Artist Samshili Abudallah’s ‘Explosion of Emotion’ is singular in that she creates a 1950s style cartoon of a woman in a wave of despair in bright and brilliant colours. The artist’s love of colour is also evident in her large red Reflesian (Malaysian flower) which hangs in the exhibition downstairs and her love for flowers flows through to an example of leather jewellery fashioned in the form.
Also of note are a collection of mixed media handbags like ‘Nature’s Bag’ fashioned from natural materials by Anna Helena Olivier, a guitar bird covered in newspaper clippings by Paskalius Haindere and a colourful ave by Mateus Shilongo titled ‘King of Angels’.
All in all an engaging collection and once again leaving their peers at Unam choking on their creative dust, ‘ArtSplash’ speaks of an atmosphere at the College of the Arts in which students are pushed to manifest their individuality and imagination to remarkable results.
‘ArtSplash’ will be on display at the Katutura Community Arts Centre until 3 December. Items are for sale.
– martha@namibian.com.na or marth__vader on Twitter
