Using old family photographs, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, creates familiar, nostalgic scenes suspended in paint and time. Often, her paintings are very personal and layers of paint cover something underneath unknown to the viewer.

 

Aspects of her work that interest me:

 

• The shadow cast by the camera flash.  

• Ideas of home, seperation, intimacy, familiarity, contrast.

• She makes me want to go home. she makes me homesick for  Zimbabwe (a place I have never visited).

• There is a graphic quality to her work, very in instinctual in her placement of paint and understanding of colour, captures the coldness of the photograph in this painting on the left.

• The strokes and colours exude emotion and bring the subjects to life. 

• In the painting on the left I like how the figure, who I assume is her, is floating above this muddy green surface. 

• Her process: collect image, make collage of image, find best dimensions of image using app, order canvas exactly to that size, project collage onto canvas, paint from the projection. 

• she tries to create a fictional family, this is due to her being displaced and not having family in close proximity. This detachment with family is the same detachment she has with almost every relationship in her life (Sotheby's Institute of Art / SOAS, 2019).

• Collection of images create an identity of yourself in the online world. (Sotheby's Institute of Art / SOAS, 2019)