Benhura works turned into a book

A diary is normally a record of a person’s private life — an account of inner feelings at a given point in time, love, pain, passion, jealousy and hate, read only by the entrant in the diary. Entries in a diary are cryptic — Tuesday 12. 30 am ‘A’ Wednesday 8.30 pm ‘K’, a diary is a marker for clandestine meetings, rendezvous with lovers, trysts, meetings on a bridge at midnight, in a deserted church yard at dawn. So a diary allows a person to live a life of cloaks and darkness, and steath by night. But words of love can also pour from a diary — a young girl’s pages devoted to simply a glimpse of the beloved, the curl of his hair at the nape of his neck, the wrinkle of his nose as he smells a sweet flower, the pace of his gait as he walks through the woods, the crease in his trousers as he bends on his knee as he asks for the writer’s hand in marriage. But some diaries are different. Dominic Benhura ‘Sculpture Diary’ is a journey for the eye through the mind of a sculptor who has given international appearance to what is happening in stone sculpture in Zimbabwe, who has taken the stone sculpture out of its cultural boundaries and given it a more universal approach and meaning.

Much as we savour the words in a favorite book, and read it time and time again, we savour and look time and time again at the photographs of Benhura’s sculptures in this diary which is a visual record of his sculptures since he began to sculpt. The photographs of Benhura in the ‘act of sculpting’ hammer and chisel blow to blow on the stones recognise Benhura as the world class sculptor he has become and make us realise how a man of his slim stature can produce such monumental works within the tradition of heroic sculpture within longer and grander traditions of sculpture than the stones of Zimbabwe. Before a very large sculpture is made, the eye must have control over the finished work, see further than the area of the stone being carved, see the proportion of the final work, see indeed the finished sculpture during work in progress and what is more, see how it is done, long before it is done, Such it was with Michelangelo, Donatello, Bernini who surely must have seen the destination of the satyrs arrow before he rendered from marble, the folds of St Teresa’s robes - such it is now with Benhura.

In this diary there are small quotes from Benhura, hiakus if you like of large and more complex ideas, but not long or large enough to take the mind or the eye away from the sculptures. On some pages there are small sketches lighteneng renditions of for example birds which translate into stone sculptures showing with telling accuracy the motion of birds in flight, birds flirting before mating, birds shivering with the cold which whistles through their wings. There are photographs of Egrets in a stone as white and glossy as an egret’s wing, there are photographs of long slim high stepping, arrogant herons,there are photographs of fluffed out mother birds ‘protecting their chicks’. Most of these photographs of sculptures are set in landscapes in which birds can be seen, and there is an unsettling realism about each bird, we feel that a bird is about to take wing, take a mate, settle in its nest. In the Sculpture Diary there is a double page spread of sculptures of children which Benhura is known for — children dancing, running, leaping, jumping, doing pushups, going through hoops, doing handstands, standing on one foot, holding one foot in the air and standing on one foot with outstretched arms saying ‘I’m here’ .

Common to all these sculptures is the movement of the children, the restlessness of the growing child, the curiosity of the child about the use of its limbs, its body, its hands, feet and muscles. One the following page are more children, this time the sculptures are named ‘Handstand’ ‘Showing Off’, ‘Party Dress’, things that children do and wear, the things that pleasure them On the next page there are older children, ‘Telling Secrets’ is a sculpture of two girls, knee deep in adolescance, changlings in time, one with her back to us, one with her blank face close to the face of the other, children we do not know, children we will never know ‘telling secrets’. The next ‘entry’ in the diary are pages of mothers with their children — mothers holding their arms out to their children, mothers taking time — sometimes much time to play with their children, mothers who lock the garden gates and keep the kids inside, mothers who occupy themselves by occupying their children.

The children have no facial features — we cannot say ‘this kid comes from my family, my country, my culture’ each child is every child, any child, any where in any world. The sculpture in each photograph is sited where the subject would be seen. The children are playing on grassy lawns under an electric blue sky. The snakes — which show how good Benhura is at somehow ‘moving the stone around’ slither through grasses although one sculpture shows three snakes rising, twined together against a white background so as to simulate a drawing and its surrounding space. There is a double page spread of a Gaboon Viper outspread on a grey rock overlooking a gunmetal sea — against a grey blanket of sky with scudding yellow tinged The sea is is dank, dull grey and made yellowish through the clouds reflection. This photograph deals with cold and isolation, as much as with sculpture. There is a photograph of a female figure propped up by her arm somehow loose in space, standing on a concrete patio criss crossed with grass and afternoon shadows. At the front of the photograph are two arm chairs, with covers of Hockney blue. The chairs are empty but there is a presence of seated figures, two men perhaps reclining with a glass in their hands idly eyeing the female figure.

There are two pages of photographs of Benhura’s very early work. There are some rudimentary female forms — almost like early efforts in clay of a young boy, there are simply, rankly, some rudimentary sculptures — but there are two works which stand out. One is a vastly proportioned torso, a sumi wrestler of a woman, the other a reclining form with a use of mass and space uncannily like the reclining figures of Henry Moore resting in England’s pastures green. In the middle of the form, between the torso and a trunk like form which will do for an arm, there is a shining white space. We look today at Benhura's work - the work of a sculptor with mastery of line which no other sculptor in Zimbabwe has achieved, the work of a sculptor who has this ability to capture movement in the human figure, a sculptor who flatly refuses stone its stasis, its lack of animation and we wonder if these early works are his and where he began as a sculptor. And then in the Diary there are photographs of his monoliths ranking in height with high trees and space and then the sky. 'Up in Arms’ is a sculpture of an abstracted female form holding up a small child into space. Here Benhura has worked part of the springstone to a cold, inhospitable grey, and left other parts with their painterly surface of umber and ochre and the copper of a bright furnace.

There is a photograph of his ‘Balancing Rocks’, pieces of springstone placed precariously upon one another to simulate the balancing rocks. Springstone takes on a grey and ageing quality and there are sudden bursts of warm brown. This ‘Balancing Rocks’ along with HIV Friend and Swing Me Mama is a classic work of Benhura, a sculpture which is unrepeatable, a sculpture which remains with one forever. From ‘Sculpture Diary’ we see the feelings Benhura invests in his work. There is his feeling for the stone, its properties, its natural shapes and colours which are ‘right’ for individual sculptures. The inside front cover of the Diary shows ‘Head’ a sculpture which brings to the fore the incredible burnished tones of springstone. There is his feeling for subject, for example his five children, brought up by parents parents as children who ‘stay at home and play’ rather than roam the streets and become victims to this and that, there is his feeling for the raw beauty of the natural surroundings in Zimbabwe, his feeling for birds and animals and snakes. Some photograph detail parts of the stone, Lion (detail) which depicts the variety of worked surfaces on one area of stone to show that age is starting to weary and condemn the lions’s might and power and virility The photograph of the lion's body in profile shows again the ageing lion, most poignantly its tail, bereft of hair, a mass of soft tissue and bones.

Here Benhura has seen the coat of the lion in the natural surface and colours of the stone, played on these things, worked them so that they become the subject, the lion, fighting against the inevitability of age and loss of power. It is not that we simply see and admire Dominic Benhura’s sculptures and wonder at the way his creative imagination deals with day to day realities and the natural world around him. We become involved with his sculptures, with these children who run and leap and link arms and dance, who do a handstand and see the world from upside down. What will become of them, what will they be, as children with a firm foundation they should have happy lives, balanced lives, fruitful lives, but will the world treat them so so that they can live this way? We become involved with the lion who is getting older, who is losing his fur, his tail, his strength and might and power. One day will he sleep under a tree and never wake, one day will he only dream of his days as the King of Beasts. we become involved with the parents who love their children so, as the children get older will they leave their parents behind to become lonely and old, withered and weathered, wrinkled and flaccid and without hope? We care about what these sculptures mean, we care for what we see. At the end of the diary on its final pages is a ‘moving picture’ of Benhura’s installation ‘Fish Eye View’. Fish Eye View is an installation which involves stone, water, electricity and shadows to create a ‘play’ on stone sculptures of fish, snakes, and diving women placed on walls on the side of an enclosed space containing large expanses of water. The electricity so animates the sculptures that their shadows reflect both in the water and on the side of the walls. We look, and feel we are seeing double, the reflection of the women and the snakes and the fish in the water and on the side of the walls. We see the fish, the women, the snakes, they are upside down, but none the less we see them.

The numerous photographs at the end of the Diary show the fish, the snakes and the women from every possible view point, Benhura says in his comment that he wants the sculptures to be more 'than just a piece of sculpture on a plinth, to be animated, to develope further his idea over movement as it applies to stone. This is Benhura’s movement ‘beyond himself’ the first of many which will take him into other realms of sculpture, other realms of creative expression and other realms of what a human being is able to do. Seen at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in the Harare Biennale 2005 ‘Fish Eye View’ in a a walled in space created a new way of seeing and perceiving both stone sculpture and sculpture in Zimbabwe. Culture to Benhura means his immediate surroundings and these surroundings are not Zimbabwe's spiritual past, not its traditions and a ‘host’ of spirits, but his fmaily life and the sacrosanct nature of the social values he holds dear. Always a man for his fellow sculptors, his friends, and his people his life is a service to others. He has travelled the world as a sculptor, but he maintains his roots — which are his home, his family his Studio where other sculptors work. ‘To Benhura a stone has endless possibilities,endless prospects, endless ways to be used in sculpture, it can be integrated with other materials, be subject to the principles of science, electronics, engineering, new technologies -as is exemplified in 'Fish Eye View. In ‘Sculpture Diary’ we are privy to a visual record not only of someof his major works but the thinking and ideas behind the work, some private thoughts and some studied considerations.