Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum The Bridge, 2021 Pencil and oil on wooden panel Work: 101.5 x 101.5 cm
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses drawing, painting, installation and animation. Her work alludes to mythology, geology and theories on the nature of the universe. Her work sits within the larger web of artists who similarly hone in on postcolonialism, neo-colonialism and transcultural identities.
Her works foreground her concern with metamorphosis and imagination as a lens through which multiple and often disparate layers of meaning, histories and forms can be simultaneously read. Often, her works take the form of narrative landscapes that appear simultaneously futuristic and ancient, shifting between representational and fantastical depictions of volcanic, subterranean, cosmological and precipitous landscapes. In so doing, the artist considers imagination as a radical, contemporary praxis – one which enables radical alterity within a reality, often perceived as fixed and univocal.
