A painting by Pam Guhrs. In Zambia, hyenas are especially considered to be vehicles of transformation between animals and humans.
Pam Guhrs completed her first exhibition in Kenya at the RaMoMA Art Gallery.
Part of this show was inspired by ancient rock paintings in eastern Zambia that address universal human concerns such as joy and pain, transformation and rites of passage, life and death.
Guhrs was born in Malawi and raised in Zambia in an area rich in wildlife — the Luangwa valley, where her father was a park warden and conservationist.
In the 1950s, he set up a game reserve with the local chief and built a self-catering lodge where half the profits went to the community and the other half to maintaining the camp.
She remembers well her father’s deep involvement with the local Kunda community. In fact, he was made headman of the village and, therefore, his immediate family was given a status that opened doors for Pam otherwise closed to white people.
So, although she has had a conservationist upbringing, she has an instinctive empathy with people who live among wild animals, something not too common in the white-dominated world of conservation.
Growing up in the Luangwa valley and having raised her children there, she was able relate to how difficult the people have it, especially the women.
“Imagine what it is like when your children are part of the food chain all the time,” she says. “People protect their crops by sleeping on little mounds out in the fields, staying awake half the night to chase away animals; people are taken by crocodiles in the river and killed by elephants all the time.
“It gives you a different view of the animal kingdom; so when tourists come around screaming, ‘Why are people burning the grass,’ you feel like shouting at them, ‘You try and live knowing a buffalo can come for you any time!’”
She is thus able to look at the whole problem from a “domestic point of view,” as she puts it. “I have been at meetings where the women tell me, ‘Do you remember when your dad used to shoot the elephants that were raiding crops?’ That was the policy in those days. The elephants would completely devastate a whole year’s food supply. It’s a huge problem. The current wildlife authorities don’t do that and people get killed. It’s a problem and I don’t know what the solution is.”
So, while her relationship with nature and animals goes back to her formative years, she was also from an early age deeply immersed in the life of the local Kunda community, whose subsistence way of life became part of her lived experience and shaped her identity so much that even her two daughters were both initiated as Kunda.
Living in Luangwa’s remote wilderness environment has informed her work on multiple levels as she draws on its history, culture and biodiversity.
“My work explores my own cultural identity. Having lived my life in Africa yet having a Western art education, I am trying to overlay two cultural experiences and come to terms with the two very different outlooks between traditional African and traditional Western art. My instinctive conclusion is that there is no pure product and that hybridity enriches each.”
She is interested in the different cultural perceptions of nature and people’s place in it — the shifting boundaries between animals and humans represented in African knowledge systems.
Animals often become metaphors for universal concerns — cycles of life, birth, death, etc — or are used in a shamanistic way, as a conduit to a different state of consciousness.
In Zambia, for example, hyenas are especially considered to be vehicles of transformation between animals and humans.
Pam Guhrs studied art at school and pursued a Fine Art degree in South Africa, but eventually returned to the Luangwa Valley with her two daughters, settled down and home-schooled them.
It was then that she realised that her formal art education really bore no relation to what was going on all around her.
“People found me strange, even a little threatening, being in the studio all day compared with the more communal art-making going on all around me,” she recalls.
She returned to the university but did her field research in the Valley, studying men’s masks from Malawi and Zambia; she eventually ended up looking at women’s initiation art, which is primarily made from clay objects.
It was here that she realised that the designs were the same as the rock art in eastern Zambia which she had seen pictures of before.
She sought advice from Paula Amos, a well known West African art historian, who suggested that she should take the women on an expedition to the rock site.
“It was incredible”, says Guhrd, describing the reaction of the women: “We had to go through some fields and forests and up the hills. When they saw the images, they sang and danced their way through each one. I was completely gobsmacked! It was an incredible experience. They were amazed to see their ancestral heritage right there on the walls.”
The focus of her own work soon became not what the images meant, “because the meanings are secret — that is how the Kunda have kept their power; after all, knowledge is power — but rather how that knowledge is managed.”
Most inhabitants of the Luangwa Valley have a subsistence life in which wild animals take on a completely different meaning from how they are perceived by Westerners.
What Guhrs began to do was to take some of the images — for instance a leopard, which, is drenched in symbolic meanings — and from her own Western perspective, would blindly draw the leopard over and over again.
“I put up four that I liked and those drawings, extraordinarily, turned out to resemble the rock ones. It was just like an unconscious gesture. Something happens when you close your eyes, so many things click into being. I was very pleased with those drawings. I am never really fascinated by my own drawings but these really struck me.”
Walking around the gallery, there seems to be an unfinished feel to Guhrs’s paintings, as if the process of creation has been left to tell its own story. I asked her whether the process was as important as the end result.
“One of the things that happened when I was living alongside my Kunda friends and neighbours was that this whole thing of being an artist and living in a studio… It was a little bit strange, a little bit sinister and my own upbringing did not sit comfortably with the way I was living. And so I wanted to find out a little bit more about it, particularly the art that women make and the masks the men make — it’s completely anonymous.
“Nobody will admit to creating the piece of work, which is a completely different attitude from Western artists. So yes, it is about the process. There is a song, a mime, a teaching, a story around each and every object that is made.”
