Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum Grandpères, 2020 Pencil and oil on canvas Work: 166 x 144 cm
'Grandpères' references two works by the American artist Whistler. The first is an 1891 portrait of the Count of Montesquieu and the second is an etching from 1860 of some men smoking pipes and sitting at the edge of a harbour surrounded by tall ships. Another visual reference in the work is a set of geodesic domes made popular by Buckminster Fuller.
According to Sunstrum, the work acts compositionally as a means for “pushing space, in introducing many depths of space: a far distant view and also this kind of tumbling forward into the immediate space created by the foliage, again as a way of creating these veils and visually suggesting this jumping through of time and space. To me, I think of these 'Grandperes' as travellers certainly, but maybe even time travellers. I’m trying to suggest something trans-cultural and trans-temporal, trans-historical, about these figures and about these little subtle details about their garments and their interactions with one another, to suggest a kind of nod to ancestry and how these little bits of micro-cosmic information are passed down genetically and through story and image.”
