Mother And Child

2011

Fruit Serpentine

  • 53cm (h)
  • 30cm (w)
  • 21cm (d)

47.5kg

portrait photo of Sylvester Mubayi

Sylvester Mubayi

Sculptor

A very traditional inspiration for an African sculpture.

Sylvester Mubayi is the most famous of Zimbabwe’s surviving first-generation ‘Shona’ sculptors and his work sometimes has an almost ‘tribal’ feel – much more so than the work of the younger artists.

Fruit serpentine is the local Zimbabwean name for a very colourful, slightly translucent type of serpentine stone. It comes from Kwekwe and is of a similar hardness to the black serpentine known as springstone. The sparkles come from crystals of mica and iron pyrite in the stone.