Reinata Sadimba (1945) - A Relaxada

Technique: Ceramic Sculpture
Dimension: 18x18
Title: The Relaxed

In perfect condition

In Reinata Sadimba's work, an essential personhood 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 slits, seeming to repeat expressions that refer to the interiority observable in her sculpture as if Reinata sculpted with her eyes closed, or, put differently, as if she had a vision anchored in a blind spot and disseminated through her hands while groping to give form to the clay, recreating a figure worked in an exemplary way, that expresses the beauty of serenity.

Sent in a wooden box and protected with bubble wrap and Styrofoam

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

Career
Reinata received traditional Makonde ethnic education that included the making of utilitarian clay objects. She learned the art of ceramics from her mother, first to feed her family after losing her father very young and later because clay allowed her to 'say things she could not tell in any other way'. Reinata's work is strongly shaped by her personal experiences. Married young and divorced twice, she had eight children, only one of whom survived. She has a tattooed face, 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 and achieved independence in 1974.

In 1975, after divorcing and leaving an abusive relationship, Reinata revolutionized her work and began adding her own adornments to her pieces.

In the 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 rooms and craft markets. The continued support of the Swiss couple allowed her to achieve economic stability to create according to her own aesthetics and imagination. This support for creation 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 piercing 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, in which Reinata's work was highlighted.

In her pieces, Reinata uses clay for its plasticity, and white limestone and graphite, which give her work a characteristic greenish color. She creates jugs, pots and pans and other pieces with anthropomorphic shapes, bodies and faces, and with scarifications or cultural marks of the Makonde ethnicity. Her pieces convey several underlying messages: "two jars emerge from one jar, in a vase the snake or nyoka recreates life and death that surround a person, the pots have multiple mouths and legs and the figures that often appear without gender are defecating". The figures she creates are linked to the tales and legends of her province.