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Concept
Colleen Madamombe
Summary
Colleen Madamombe (1964 - 2009) was a Zimbabwean sculptor working primarily in stone. Her work expresses themes of womanhood, motherhood, and tribal Matriarchy.
Colleen Madamombe was born in 1964 in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe following independence in 1980) and received her secondary education at school in Kutama, between 1979 and 1984. She obtained a Diploma in Fine Arts at the BAT Workshop School of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe from 1985 to 1986. In 1986 she married the Zimbabwean sculptor Fabian Madamombe, with whom she later had seven children. Initially, she specialized in drawing and painting but in 1987 she went to help her husband in his sculpting at Chapungu Sculpture Park where she started stone carving. Colleen became close friends with fellow female sculptor, Agnes Nyanhongo, and rapidly developed her own style of sculpting in the three years she stayed full-time at Chapungu.
While some of her early work was inspired by observation of ants, bees, butterflies and caterpillars, Colleen became best known for her depiction of women and their Shona culture. She illustrated many themes of womanhood: women at work, harvesting, carrying water or children and giving birth. Her female figures quickly became a symbol of womanhood in Zimbabwe and were adopted by the Zimbabwean International Film Festival as the trophy award for all winning women entrants. She won the award “Best Female Artist of Zimbabwe” three times.
Colleen worked predominantly in Springstone (a local type of hard serpentine rock much used by Zimbabwean sculptors), but also used Opal stone (a softer variety of serpentine), for example for her major work “The Birth”, now part of the Chapungu permanent collection. She used both rough and polished stone in her sculpture, often leaving parts of the surface of the stone in its raw oxidized form to provide color for hair or clothes, while creating expressive faces, arms and hands in the fully polished black stone. Skirts would sometimes be chiseled to a rough grey surface, while other clothing such as a blouse was stippled to a finer texture.
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