Zimpapers Logo

Stephen Garan’anga Visual Art
Colleen Madamombe (1964 – 2009) was one of the country’s finest stone sculptors. Madamombe was a short woman of great energy and girth who at her peak could out-carve any man in a traditionally male domain for that.
Born in 1964 in Harare, Colleen trained at the famous BAT Studios of Fine Arts of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe from 1985-1986 and in the very year tied the knot with Fabien Madamombe (one of Zimbabwe’s renowned stone masters).

In 1991 she proceeded to work at Chapungu Sculpture Park for three years where she started carving a series of women figures in various activities, states of mind and explored all manner of traditional and academic subject matter through commitment to one theme.

Not a stroll in the park it was for her in the early days to solely focus on a mono-theme as the critique world in various forms took a snip at the idea.
The fortune of the paradigm is proven in the territory of art and art criticism, even if in the landslip between cybernetics and linguistic, inspirational for the semiology of art, the dream of an understanding of artwork based on the yardstick of the theories of information has fallen through.

Art is not an object with a message everyone is agreed about that! But how many times does the rhetoric of criticism, not to mention those all purpose, jack of all-trades texts called for by the wholesale communication of the called meaning of works, not convey such a sound intention?

It must be acknowledged that works are often disarming; the jargon and vulgate of the new information and communication technologies thus propose lexical and cognitive solutions which make it possible to tame these “informational holes” represented by a good many contemporary artworks.

Through determination and aptitude Madamombe won world acclaim and the highest award for a woman artist for three years. Some notable rewards for her shear hard-work include the first price for women over 26 years and the Longman Woman Artists’ Exhibition.

Having had her sculptures travel and exhibited in numerous high esteem shows in various places like Germany, France, Holland, England and US, Colleen’s short stout women figures quickly became the most attractive symbol of womanhood in Zimbabwe, representing the strong matriarchal stature that is active, involved, and hardworking and yet able to discharge all her traditional duties as expected.

These themes of womanhood, women at work, harvesting, carrying water, winnowing and giving birth which are experiences with which she was personally familiar with are some of the subjects that led her to acquire an inspirational role within the stone sculpture movement.

Such huge and detailed works like “Proud of my dress”,”What a nice time with my daughters”, “Mom playing with daughter” carved in one of the world’s hardest rocks the springstone, weighing hundreds of kilograms truly bear testimony about how tough Colleen was.

The neckless dwarfed thick featured fat female figures really were her DNA signature that no one could copy. Even in the blackest of nights one would not mistakenly identify her sculptures by merely taking a feel by hand.

Stone sculpture was really a career of choice for the icon.
The theme of mother and child was an important one to Colleen so much that during the late 1990s Agnes Nyanhongo and she realised that a small percentage of women were beginning to break free from the expected norms of the society from which they were reared and found the voice required to speak out on behalf of their gender.

Thus Agnes Nyanhongo and Madamombe became two clear and remarkable examples of this transformation.
In a publication titled Nyanhongo and Madamombe by Chapungu Sculpture Park, the two icons described themselves in their own words as “I think that it is the artistic spirit, we are people who can bring out things within us, to expose them. Like sculpting, we bring out what we think or what we have and how we think things should be, it’s like bringing it out of the stone: it will be stone at first and something comes out from nothing.”

The themes of woman today still provide continuing inspiration as Madamombe was interested not just in the emotional and spiritual side to a woman’s life but was also fascinated by the basic physical appearance and movement peculiar to her sex.

The energy and stature of the woman in her work revealed great pride and authority even in the most humble of characters and activities portrayed.
The results of this artistic determination can be seen in sculptures which, although often bound by external expectations regarding beauty and subtlety, nevertheless represent some of the most honest and direct portrayals.

Her main goal was to represent the voice of a new generation of Zimbabwean women and this was emphasised predominantly through a contrast of rough and polished parts of springstone.