Shona Sculptures

Shona Sculpture - "A modern art movement founded on centuries of tribal culture"

Shona tribe, from Zimbabwe in Africa, are world-renowned for their skill in transforming rock into beautiful works of art. Each piece is painstakingly created using simple hand tools and the skills handed down by generations. The stone sculptures produced by these artists display great individuality of form and content. Every piece is an original and an investment for the astute collector.

Shona Art is powerfully and superbly human, with so much of the work portraying messages in a figurative and forcefully abstract style, carved with immense skill, it cannot help but to convey mankind's basic feelings and experiences to everyone, no matter what their cultural heritage. This art is both extremely seductive and shatteringly beautiful. The stone alone with it's amazing variety of colours and textures, of soft and hard multi-coloured stone invites you to explore and to touch, visually, emotionally and mentally.

Most important of all, this art is truthful to the stone and to the ideals and subjects with which the artists work, the sculptors not only have an intensive technical knowledge and understanding of the stone, but also a great spiritual respect for this natural resource, which they believe, like all other things around them, has an innate spiritual life force of its own.

Although many of the beliefs can seem complex to western cultures, in Shona Sculpture the artist expresses the fundamental relationships between the two guiding forces in Shona life - the visible physical world and the unseen spiritual world that exists in all cultures, but in Shona culture represents very influential ancestral spirits who are communicators between the dead and the living.

The strengths of these remarkable sculptures help to establish the reasons for their success in communicating directly and successfully to a varied and demanding international public.