Reinata Sadimba (1945) - A Relaxada

Technique: Ceramic Sculpture
Dimension: 25x25
Title: The Relaxed

In perfect condition

In Reinata Sadimba's work, an essential rostity (face-ness) is defined: there is no portrait, but rather the primordial subjectivity that derives from a stylization that aims. Thus in the work we observe the eyes, the mouth, the ears and the nostrils, which are enunciated through incisions and grooves, seemingly repeating expressions that refer to the interiority observable in her sculpture as if Reinata sculpted with closed eyes, or, put differently, as if she had a vision anchored at a blind spot and disseminated through her hands while she gropes to give shape to the clay, recreating a figure worked in an exemplary manner, that expresses the beauty of serenity.

Shipped in a wooden box and protected with bubble wrap and polystyrene

Biography
Reinata Sadimba ComIH (Mueda, 1945) is a Mozambican ceramist who has exhibited her work in various art institutions around the world.

Background
Reinata received traditional education from the Makonde ethnic group that included making utilitarian objects in clay. She learned the art of pottery from her mother, first to feed her family after losing her father at a very young age and later because clay allowed her to “say things she did not know how to tell in any other way.” Reinata’s work is strongly shaped by her personal experiences. Married young and divorced twice, she had eight children, of whom only one survived. She has facial tattooing, according to Makonde traditions. While creating, she was part of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), an armed struggle against the Portuguese colonial government that began in 1964 for the country’s liberation, which enabled its independence in 1974.

In 1975, after divorcing and leaving a relationship considered abusive, Reinata revolutionized her work and began to add her own adornments to her pieces.

In the early 1980s, she collaborated on a rural project with a Swiss couple who had settled near Mueda, where she resided. This collaboration brought more visibility to her art. However, following the Civil War (1976-1992), she emigrated with her only son to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where she lived with her sister Josefina. Here she began to exhibit in small art galleries and craft markets. The ongoing support of the Swiss couple allowed her to achieve economic stability to create according to her own aesthetic and imagination. This support propelled her art, enabling her to develop new techniques and firing methods. Her stay in Tanzania helped her develop an aesthetic and representation of the human body, creating living and penetrating forms, until she created her own universe.

In 1992 she returned to Mozambique and settled in Maputo. Here she received substantial support from Augusto Cabral, then Director of the Mozambique Natural History Museum, and established her studio inside the museum itself. In 1998, the museum hosted a week of teaching on traditional ceramics, during which Reinata’s work was highlighted.

In her pieces, Reinata uses clay, for its pliability, and white limestone and graphite, which give her work its characteristic green color. She creates jars, pots and pans and other kinds of pieces with anthropomorphic shapes, with bodies and faces and with scarifications or cultural marks of the Makonde ethnic group. Her pieces carry several underlying messages: “two jars emerge from a jar, in a vase the snake or nyoka recreates life and death that involve a person, the pots have many mouths and legs and the figures that usually appear genderless are defecating.”[1] The figures she creates are tied to the tales and legends of her province."