This exhibition features selected works from the Lechwe Trust Heritage Collection by 29 artists, representing decades of how artists have witnessed, interpreted, and responded to nature and their immediate environment. The theme is a reminder that humans are not superior inhabitants of nature, but a small part of it; Eddie Mumba's Village, 1988 sets the tone from beauty to ecological urgency. The works move through the full breadth of the natural world including wildlife, water, foliage and the weather. These are the subjects, depicted across painting, photography, sculpture and mixed media by artists who have observed closely and interpreted with passion.
Agnes Buya Yombwe's Our Totems, 1993 reaches to the depth of that relationship. In depicting the tree, mushroom, snake, bird, fish, cloud, and millipede, Yombwe maps a culture in which nature is a system of meaning, one in which identity, community, and the environment coexist. Françoise d'Elbée's photomontage Natural Fusion, 2021 moves with a similar dialogue, collapsing boundaries between the human figure and the natural world, to ask where one ends and the other begins. Tubayi Dube's Pangolin (1994) reminds us of the urgency of saving a heavily endangered and protected animal, a work that has grown more pressing in the thirty years since it was made. Gabriel Ellison Rainy Day in old Kabwata, 1970 turns the focus onto a situation that returns with every rainy season - familiar, yet sometimes devastating.
These works from the Lechwe Trust Heritage Collection form a documented history of how nature has been viewed, used, and engaged with by artists across time. They are a timely reminder to us all that the dialogue between human life and the life of the rest of the natural world is long, critical, and never ending.
Text by Mary Zulu & Nikki Ashley
