I am delighted to share our March Artist Spotlight - a monthly feature for paying subscribers. It is written by Anne Kimunguyi and published on either the third or fourth Sunday of each month.
Today, Anne considers the work of Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum whose “dreamy illustrations explore time and place as overlapping entities.”
Thank you Anne.
Enjoy everyone x Lou.
A fantastical current gently courses through Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s sketched works. Portraits of characters reclining, gathered together, posing, or caught mid-conversation, their eyes steadily peering out of the canvas are situated a melange of surroundings. Parts of their bodies are blocked out, other parts are almost transparent – the arm of a woman in The Two I holding a hawk see-through enough that through it we can see leaves falling from the tree in the backdrop, the other acts as a perch for the large hawk. The two almost identical men of Grandperes stand knowingly in the middle of the canvas, their large eyes mysterious, and their relative size vis-à-vis the background of plants and ships, the former of which are visible through their bodies, evoking a sense of grandeur. This surreal-like play with proportions, environment and beings themselves, offers a visual language through which Sunstrum’s ‘collage’, of sorts, comes together. The layered effect of her works, created by sketch-like drawing of figures who often seem made up of their background, rather than their physical selves, surfaces an intrinsic linkage between place and identity, that lies at the heart of Sunstrum’s practise.
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