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Chituwa Jemali To Chituwa Jemali, sculpture is a new way of expressing that he already knows has seen or heard and what is embedded in his historic consciousness and sense of ancestry. Like many young artists, Chituwa understands much of what took place before his birth and his circumstances are a part of the circumstances of his history. Chituwa´s work embodies concerns which are centuries old, concerns of religion, concerns of social history, a history in part engraved on the walls of caves, and told by the fireside, a history expressive in the music of the dance and the beat of the drum, and the mask in the masquerade.
Some of Chituwa´s sculpture deal with celestial beliefs, angels with whitewashed wings of stone, seen through a bioscope, which screens the heavens. Some deal with fallen angels, wings askew, lying like elegant piers on the ground. Shone culture is one of staunch religion, which refuses to be weathered by time, myth in African context, as part of traditional religious belief is the subject of some of his sculptures. Myth to Chituwa is not the utterances of gods in winged chariots, of the roar of monsters that rise from the sea, words carrying on the foam. Myth is unwritten law, the embodiment of moral order, the harbinger of conscience. Chituwa feels his inner feelings are the winter landscape of his mind, they are revealed through the facial expressions on his sculptures, which although they are not self-portraits, they reveal much of himself. Chituwa´s sculpture speaks of cultures which are not his own, or if they are tangentially so, the culture of his ancestors, the culture of his Malawian descent, the culture of space, the open ended spaces of the Zimbabwean landscape, the European space, squeezed into a larger world. Sometimes his subjects are frozen, huddled in stone; sometimes they are free, almost disassociated from their material. Chituwa´s sculpture are of Springstone, rock of ages cleft for man as artist, the stone of rocks and crannies, the stone of weather and erosion, the stone hot from the quarry. Chituwa gives to the history of stone a contemporary context, makes it a material specifically suited to modern sculpture. He is a profound sculptor, he prizes the depth of Chituwa´s feeling from the stone, and he does not skim the surface but defines the essence of what he has to say. To Chituwa, sculpture is art rather than a source of income, a search for meaning of things which in the African context has been expressed in other ways, trough music, dance and the spoken words, through praise poems and proverbs, through masks within the Western Bantu context, and through the different states of consciousness which pertain to the spiritual realm. Chituwa´s sculpture have a sense of what in the West is known as "otherness", those things which are believed in but which can not be understood or reasoned with. Here is a sculptor who is not daunted by what has become his tradition, Chituwa´s work reflects the early days of the sculpture, when artists struggled to understand what art was and what an artist was, and tried to represent their way of life in stone. If he is closer to the bushman painter and the mask maker that the artist of today, closer to the dancer and story teller, rather than today´s raconteur in stone, his sense of history is inherent in the sensibility of his art. Chituwa did not leave his cultural credentials behind at the border post when he crossed to Europe; they indeed were passports, stamped so that he could return. If he is cast in the mould of the master artists of the past, those before sculpture and those who began to make sculpture, he spans generations and indeed makes the concept of generations spurious. He swims against the tide, yet he is the first to reach the shore. Artist's Sculpture (Click to view):
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