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African chronicles
Celia Winter Irving, Africancolours.net
January 25, 2007

http://zimbabwe.africancolours.net/content/11320%22%20target=%22_blank

African Chronicles

One of Zimbabwe’s first generation of stone sculptors Mr. Paul Gwichiri has closed his chapter as a worker of the National Art Gallery of Zimbabwe with a one man show titled African Chronicles at the same venue. The show of his most recent stone sculptures and paintings shows how fresh in his mind are the traditions associated with his African culture, which are largely based on people’s spiritual understanding of their own lives and what they see and experience around them. He will always respect his past and see it as his heritage. He sees this past as much connected to his life today and thus he represents it in his sculptures.

After working for forty years as an attendant and head attendant at the National Art Gallery, Mr. Gwichiri has become over the years an ‘institution’ in the Zimbabwean art world. A story teller in words and stone has endeared himself to visitors to the National Gallery through his tales of African yore, through his ‘photographic memory’ of working with the first director of the institution Frank McEwen at the National Art Gallery Workshop School.

Spanning the history of Zimbabwe’s stone sculpture as we know it today, Mr. Gwichiri brings to his sculpture still, the legacy of African traditions which shaped and formed the work of the early sculptors at the National Art Gallery Workshop School were started carving in 1964.

At the National Gallery Paul Gwichiri is recognised as a valued repository of knowledge about those early days of Frank McEwen and the Workshop School and the sculptors of the time. He gives freely of his knowledge and without restraint and he has been of immeasurable help to many scholars and students of the stone sculpture from the world over. He brings the 'life and' times' of those early days to life, he spins anecdotes and creates work pictures of those who were involved in the origins of the stone sculpture movement.

Paul Gwichiri represents a fixed point in the history of the stone sculpture and a time which saw the sculpture as truly representative of African traditions, and their cultural and spiritual practises. Today in respect for this he remains promulgating these things in his sculptures. His close associates in sculpture were the great names in Zimbabwe's stone sculpture today, the late Joram Mariga, the late Nicholas Mukomberanwa, the late Joseph Ndandarika, He has had and has a wealth of things to say and speak about in his sculptures, a wealthy of memories to put across in stone.

Coming from Nyanga, one of the "homes" of Zimbabwe's stone sculpture and the birth place of the late Joram Mariga and Claud Nyanhongo, and where Vukutu can be found with its "rim around the moon' of mountains where many early sculptors worked, he is well situated in the history of the stone sculpture movement and today is often the first person that visitors to tile National Gallery of Zimbabwe wish to meet somehow the last 'embodiment' of those early adventurous and eventful days.

If today Paul Gwichiri is asked what he sculpts he say simply 'African traditions'. The content of his work is as fresh today as it was forty years ago when he worked at the National Gallery Workshop School. His work tells many stories about traditional times in Zimbabwe, it is often couched in a spiritual language, it reveals the depth of 'African mysticism' within traditional beliefs. Yet it speaks also of everyday things which take place in rural Africa, the cycles of life and death which perpetuate human existence. In 'Birth' (1971) Gwichiri makes an explicit statement about the actual moment of giving birth. Here the woman holds her bloated stomach while she watches the board of her child emerging from her womb. There is also 'Strong Woman' (1976) a woman standing upright, her stomach extended, a woman taking the discomfort of pregnancy in her stride, a woman who will work 'right through to the end'. In both these sculptures Gwichiri recalls in his own observations in Nyanga where he was born and brought up, observations of women who have found it natural to give birth and prepare for birth. In ‘Strong Woman' it is possible to see how the 'traditional' African woman took pregnancy in her every day stride, accommodated it into her way of life, her daily routine, her obligations to her husband. In 'Pregnant' (1969) we see an animal, a small creature pregnant, to the animal part of her 'natural state'. All these sculptures are tender and evocative of the 'silent moments' of a female pregnancy.

Clean lined and simple Paul Gwichiri's work refreshes the memory of the work of the first generation of sculptors working in stone in Zimbabwe, those early 'story tellers' whose work was full of humour and very close to the natural world and its inhabitants in rural Zimbabwe. Wishing to remain true to that early generation of sculptors his work has not changed over the years although technically it has become more proficient, more assured.

Paul Gwichiri has taken up painting and some of these paintings, haunting renditions of some of his sculptures with emphasis on the natural properties of the stone and some which deal with nature as he knows it in Nyanga. Some of these paintings are represented in his exhibition Paul Gwichiri has had a close association with the National Gallery of Zimbabwe as a sculptor. He was represented in the Annual Exhibition from his work was seen in the 'launching pad' exhibitions for Zimbabwean stone sculpture in Europe 1970: Art Faricanie Contemporain de la Communaute de Vukutu (Musee d"arte Modeme de la Ville Paris,France 1971: Sculpture Contemporaine des Shonas d' Afrique. His work has been represented in prestigious exhibitions in London, UK, Germany, France and Switzerland.

The content of his work is not encoded in a symbolism and imagery for African traditions and beliefs which make it hard for people to understand. It is accessible and therefore we learn much from it. As much as he has contributed to the life and vibrancy of the National Gallery Paul Gwichiri has contributed to the development of Zimbabwe's stone sculpture through sculptures which are genuine, gentle and affectionate representations of African life as it was once lived and in many ways continues to be lived today.

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