Zambia

^{Pan Guhrs-Carr}

^{Pam Guhrs born in Malawi and raised in Zambia in one of Africa’s prolific wildlife area the Luangwa valley. Living in Luangwa’s remote wilderness environment has informed her work on multiple levels as she draws on its history, indigenous cultures and biodiversity. In this context she was exposed to and deeply immersed into the Kunda subsistence way of life which has become part of her lived experience and has shaped her identity, so much so that her two daughters are both initiated as Kunda.}

^{The Kunda people who live in Luangwa River valley, are outnumbered by an abundant population of wild animals including lions and elephants. Unable to keep livestock due to sleeping sickness, and isolated by flooding for half the year, they have historically survived by hunting and subsistence farming. There are six Kunda chiefs, one of whom is Paramount.}

^{The notion of the artist as an individual is a quintessentially western one and bore no relation to Guhrs’ local experience, which meant she was forced to question her western art education. Fascinated by the fact that in African art  the importance is placed on anonymity and that the process is more important than the product, she embarked on an intensive nine year field research study. While learning about Kunda women’s initiation art in Luangwa she discovered its relation to rock images in Eastern Zambia}

^{These lime and tar paintings on this show are a reverberation of the Zambian rock paintings that inspired them. Guhrs’ artwork aims not for representation but rather acts as a vehicle for channelling the sensations and emotions evoked by the rock art and by the Kunda initiation objects to which they relate.}

^{“I am fascinated by how the rock paintings correspond to complex philosophical concepts that are represented as minimal abstract signs.  Much of the initiation teaching to the young girls deals with issues concerning social and spiritual life. It is also about coping with life, loss, death, birth and there is always as element of regenerative transformation - that suffering may result in healing.  Animals too are often used to represent different aspects of transformation“. These are issues that have always pervaded my own art”, says Guhrs.}

^{The elemental materials used such as tar and lime, both subject to chemical changes, used in Guhrs’ paintings reflect these concepts of transformation and regeneration.}

 ^{By learning these images through repetition she aims not to reproduce or to document them but to try to understand them. The process becomes more important than the product. Through the process of repetition she learns, and this becomes part of her in the same way as one would internalise a piece of music, in a mode of reworking these images with closed eyes, in a meditative state, in a manner described by Berggruen, where the inner and outer world, the observer and the thing are merged}

^{Using Indian ink and a large brush these images are drawn repeatedly with a tutored hand and then later with eyes closed, until the figure becomes a cipher. Closing the eyes releases the unconscious gesture or the underlying emotive aspects of the form. The replication of painting and repainting simplifies the sign in a Zen-like way until it is personalised. There is an intensity of labour necessary to capture this apparent spontaneity. There is here an attempt to grasp on a level of feeling rather than visual superficiality. These gestural images resembling a type of calligraphy are then enlarged in a manner related to western technical drawing, by a series of grids. The resulting drawings are completed in tar with a large brush.}

^ANIMALS

^{“I am interested in the different cultural perceptions of nature and people’s place in it…the shifting boundaries between animals and humans represented in indigenous knowledge systems… Animals often become metaphors for universal concerns - cycles of life, birth, death etc. or are used in a shamanistic way, as a conduit to a different state of consciousness“.}

^{This is zua na mwezi pambana which is a metaphorical eclipse of the sun and moon denoting male and female characteristics in harmony. The images are also used as didactic tools to inform people about the importance of domestic harmony.}

^{A common story told about this image is of a man who return home for lunch and finds his wife missing. He decides to go fishing. While he is away his wife returns; as he is not home she too goes out. The pattern of arriving home, leaving and missing each other is repeated several times. While they are awy both husband and wife constantly wander around ‘lost’, they keep asking people whom they encounter where their respective spouse is to be found and they are constantly misdirected. Eventually they arrive home at the same time, thereby forming a single entity in the same way that an eclipse appears to create a unity between the sun and moon}

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