Portia Zvavahera – interview: ‘It’s like I’m speaking with the souls of people, with individuals’

In her only in-person interview for her latest UK show, now at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, the artist discusses the role of dreams and her spirituality in the narratives and atmospheres vividly evoked in her transcendental paintings

Portia Zvavahera. Photo: Neil Hanna.

by VERONICA SIMPSON

Portia Zvavahera’s star is undoubtedly in the ascendant. Since her first major European solo presentation, The Milk of Dreams at the 2022 Venice Biennale, the Zimbabwean artist (b1985, Harare) has been on a roll, thanks to the support of major galleries in Europe (David Zwirner) and Africa (Stevenson). She was in multiple international group shows in 2022 and 2023, but last year she had her first major solo presentations in France (a monumental painting at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris) and the UK, with a career-spanning institutional solo show at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, that is now at Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. But her works, revealing natural and supernatural worlds via a distinctive palette and unusual technique, have been slowly accumulating interest since 2013, when she first appeared in Venice.

What the new Fruitmarket show reveals, thanks to its strictly chronological presentation, is how her practice has grown in scale, gestural freedom, technical skill and confidence. From the contorted figure (herself) in Labour Pains (2012) – a woman’s body spreadeagled on a bed, her washed-out skin tones in shades of ashy grey, her mouth a Munch-ian howl of deep blue, articulating the out-of-body experience of childbirth – she has moved to a freer, looser, more expansive practice, which is visible from 2016 onwards. The Fruitmarket presentation starts in the ground floor gallery, with works including Labour Pains, evolving to works from 2014 to 2016, which show her revelling in the power of pattern, but in a more representational use of traditional prints on dresses or furniture (such as Ndahwarara, or Ndokumbirawo Ishe, both 2014), moving towards a far more expressionistic and ethereal layering of lace and lace-like prints (Handidi Kuzviona and Embraced and Protected in You, both 2016, and I Want to Stay in Love, 2017). These and later works evoke not just the material qualities of lace, but the beauty and vulnerability of skin, and of the “sacred veils” that weave between the physical and spiritual worlds. Zvavahera’s early fascination with lace came from being fixated, in her 20s, on the idea of white weddings. But somewhere down the line, she tells the Fruitmarket director, Fiona Bradley, in an insightful Zoom interview: “The lace changed into something else. It became a protection veil … a sacred veil, protecting a woman inside. And then it became an angel.”

Portia Zvavahera. Embraced and Protected in You, 2016. Oil-based printing ink and oil bar on canvas, 210 × 400 cm (82 5/8 × 157 1/2 in). Private collection.

Zvavahera mixes imagery drawn from her dreams with that of Shona and Christian proverbs and mythologies. She tells Bradley that she “paints only when moved to”, when she feels the urge “to take out what’s inside me. To communicate in my own space with the most high so I can get the message across.” When creating her paintings, she has an unusual technique of layering thick wax for batik-style printing, or oil-based printing ink on to canvas or linen, and then scraping the ink off, in a dynamic process that – whether from the vigour of that physical gesture or its outcomes alone – creates a distinct aura and presence for each of these bold, evocative and yet mysterious paintings.

Her first fine art studies were in 2003-04, at BAT Visual Art Studios, National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare  – mostly life-drawing, she says, in the classical European style, with a dash of 20th-century experimentation – but her current repertoire of imagery and mixed-media techniques evolved under the painter and activist Charles Kamangwana when she attended Harare Polytechnic in 2005-06. She works mainly from a studio at her home in Harare, but has a larger studio nearby, enabling her to work on multiple canvases at once.

The artist does not relish the publicity that comes with success, and she avoids public appearances or talking about her work – this is the only in-person interview given for her UK shows. She made an exception, while in Edinburgh, to speak to Studio International, at the gallery, along with Bradley and her friend and director at Stevenson Gallery (South Africa and Amsterdam), Sinazo Chiya.

Veronica Simpson: Your work is such a powerful portrayal of your interior world, your dreams. When did you realise that this vivid inner world and landscape speaks to others, that it translates to a more universal experience?

Portia Zvavahera: I think from the moment that my grandmother was asking about what we have been dreaming. In that moment, I realised that dreaming was part of our world, part of us, part of everything that we do. That’s when I realised that, because it was so, so important to remember our dreams. I realised that it’s something to do with the future, the foretelling.

Portia Zvavahera. Labour Ward, 2012. Oil-based printing ink on paper, 147 × 121 cm (57 7/8 × 47 5/8 in). Private collection, Mauritius.

VS: This is something very important in Shona culture and mythology, in a way that it isn’t in western philosophy. We have lost touch with the idea that dreams are important.

PZ: I think it’s important in every culture.

Sinazo Chiya: Even in the west, in psychology – Freud, Jung – or in Chinese culture and Indian cultures, dreams are very important. Within Zimbabwean culture, it’s really part of the homestead. When people lose track of their lineage, they start with their dreams to figure out where to find direction.

VS: I love that. I remember in my 20s being fascinated by dreams – having done a psychology degree, I was introduced to Jung and Freud – and I would write them down. And the more you focus on your dreams, the better you are at remembering them. Then, when I had kids, along with the huge sleep disruptions, I lost that connection. It was not a priority. Sleep was!

PZ: I find that always. It’s like when you’re tired, you just want to sleep, to shut down. So. you’re constantly fighting but the dreams come to you.

VS: But if it’s in your culture to appreciate and recognise the importance of dreams, then that will encourage you to do it. When did it become your work?

PZ: It’s also because of my Christian background – you know, Joseph was listening to his dreams. I take all that into my life so that dreaming is also about work but, most importantly, it’s about myself, my life.

Portia Zvavahera. Labour Pains, 2012. Oil-based printing ink on paper, 100 × 75 cm (39 3/8 × 29 1/2 in). Private collection.

VS: There is such a powerful acknowledgement of the female experience in your work  – childbirth, of course – but also the solidarity, and the sense of ever-present threat that we have drummed into us, as women, growing up in patriarchal societies. Is that a specific aim to represent female power but also female fragility?

PZ: I only have my experience. I could hear your stories, but it’s difficult for me to translate them on to canvas. But when I have my stories, they are in me, they are my emotions, I am able to transfer every emotion I am feeling.

VS: Yes, but the British way is to keep quiet about these fears. “Let’s pretend it’s all fine!”

Fiona Bradley: We select artists to help articulate our fears.

VS: Exactly. I have read that it is very important to you that, in order to get down the darkest aspects, the full embodied experiences of your dreams, you have to also find a point of what you describe as victory. You paint until you find a place of safety and transcendence that you can represent in the picture.

PZ: They are kind of prayers in the paintings. They are kind of what I’m thinking … It’s like a protection: if I’m like a soldier, this is the gun.

Portia Zvavahera. Left: Pane Rima Rakakomba (1) (There’s Too Much Darkness), 2023. Oil-based printing ink and oil bar on canvas, 222 × 332 cm (87 3/8 × 130 3/4 in). Norval Foundation. Right: Kudonhedzwa kwevanhu (Fallen people), 2022. Oil-based printing ink and oil bar on canvas, 215 × 299.5 cm (84 5/8 × 117 7/8 in). Private collection. Installation view, Portia Zvavahera: Zvakazarurwa, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, 2025. Courtesy the artist, Stevenson and David Zwirner. Photo: Ruth Clark.

VS: You told Fiona (Bradley) that the 2023 painting Pane Rima Rakakomba (There’s Too Much Darkness) represented a dream you had that rats were coming for you when you were pregnant, while you were sleeping under a tree, surrounded by darkness. That sounds like a terrifying dream. But there’s a figure of a woman holding you, which you said is like an angel protecting you. By placing that protective figure in the painting, does it make it more possible for you to represent the darkness at its most potent?

PZ: If I go back to the Bible, my Christian faith is that we were given dominion over all things. If we have dominion over all things, then we have so much control even of the spiritual side. Spiritually, we have control to redirect (our energies) wherever we want them to be.

VS: I like your sense of dominion being mastery of energies rather than the more usual reading – of man having dominion over the animals and the rocks and plants. That hasn’t exactly served us well as a species. Can you tell me about the role of animals in your paintings. There are several here that feature rats, which of course are a source of dread to many people.

PZ: It depends on the symbols. It was rats and now it’s snakes. I don’t know how I connect with animals, but maybe because we have totems of animals. And there have always been certain animals – I started with bulls, and it went to owls.

FB: I think it’s so interesting, the idea of the totemic animal is very different from the animal in dreams – the animal that’s part of you, or an animal that’s threatening you. There must be some relationship there somehow.

PZ: Hmmm. I have to look into that.

SC: It depends how you function in Christianity and also within our culture. In Shona indigenous culture, the totemic is also not devoid of the spiritual. What’s interesting about Portia’s work is how she coalesces these things – as you’ve pointed out, the darkness and the light. She makes room for all these things to coexist. Yes, it’s totemic, but also deeply subconscious. There’s the dream animal, but also the family lineage animals. These spiritual battles are also cultural battles. There’s a lot happening all in one go.

VS: I think there is a resurgence of interest in older forms of spirituality and their visual symbolism: among millennials particularly, there is a real interest in astrology and tarot, and it is partly because all these visually loaded practices relate back to more ancient traditions and mythologies. We seem to be finding them fascinating again, having spent the last century or more thinking science can solve everything, or the material world is all that matters. Are you surprised to find how universal the appeal of your work is, though it comes from such a personal place?

PZ: It’s very humbling. I don’t know if I can explain. It’s very touching. It’s like I’m speaking with the souls of people, with individuals. For me it’s really a big thing.

VS: I can imagine you wanting to take great care with that power that people are seeing in your work.

PZ: There was a friend who came to see the show, and she was feeling very lonely at that time, and she came in and said she felt like the painting was hugging her. She cried. I didn’t know what to do.

SC: You’ve already done it. Your work has done it.

Portia Zvavahera. Ndirikukutsvagai Ndirimugomo, 2024. Oil-based printing ink and oil bar on linen, 213 × 209 cm (83 7/8 × 82 1/4 in). Courtesy the artist, Stevenson and David Zwirner. Installation view, Portia Zvavahera: Zvakazarurwa, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, 2025. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

VS: I am also interested in your representation of nature as sanctuary but also the nature in your paintings can seem overwhelming. There is a 2024 painting of a crouching figure (Ndirikukutsvagai Ndirimugomo) and, as the viewer, you feel both the safety and the dark power in that space. We tend to romanticise nature in the west, especially in the ecological art movement, but it can be a scary place.

PZ: I love going to the mountains. I go to feel the presence when I’m there. It gives me that hug. People go to therapy and talk about their problems, but when I am in the mountains and talk about these things, nobody is taking those things and telling them to someone else. I say it there and it disappears, and I feel great afterwards. That’s where I feel healed. I speak out loud, like I am now. Where I live, there’s this big mountain in the background so I always walk there.

VS: You have said: “I always leave a blank space. I feel it always needs to be filled by a higher power.” By that, do you mean that sense of inspiration that we all feel, when we are doing work that we love, and enjoying the feeling that flows through us. Are we all tapping into the same source?

PZ: I am talking about the one who created us, who created all this universe.

SC: It’s a universal God.

VS: How do you know which space is that space to leave blank when you are working?

PZ: The truth is I don’t know. I just know I have something that I want to paint and then I put it on the canvas and I’m working: it comes naturally. I don’t put it in with a sense of an effort, that this is going here and this is going there. It comes depending on the feeling that I have during the time of that painting. I am trying to paint a certain dream on a canvas, but if it doesn’t come out the way I want it to be, I let it be. I don’t force things when I’m working. I let it come as it comes.

VS: You have said that when you have a dream and you are trying to get it on to a painting, you might end up with several paintings on the go at the same time, because you have not got it right the first time. Do all the other paintings go on to become finished work?

PZ: When I have this dream, if it doesn’t come out the way I was imagining it, I do it on another painting and allow it to manifest whatever it is. And maybe it comes. Maybe it doesn’t. So, I keep going.

FB: Do you ever give up? Do you ever think a painting is not working, and put it away?

PZ: I don’t give up, because I feel I’m giving power to that dream. I don’t give up on a painting, I keep working. Sometimes when I’m working, it has to reveal its meaning through that process of painting, (of me) allowing whatever needs to come out. Sometimes when I’m done, I then discover: “Oh, OK, this is what it means.” It’s a discovering process also.

SC: Even with the dominion that you have, you still allow the work as a prayer to give you something back.

PZ: Yes, and it’s about allowing the most high to also express itself.

Portia Zvavahera. The Energy Present, 2024. Oil-based printing ink and oil bar on linen, 195.4 × 197.5 cm (76 7/8 × 77 3/4 in). Courtesy the artist, Stevenson and David Zwirner.

VS: There is such an amazing energy in the colours, the technique, the layering. Are you inspired by any particular school of art – such as surrealism – that you feel has influenced your palette, or does it come from your own internal investigations?

PZ: When I’m using colour, it’s either the dream was very, very dark, or very light. I don’t really decide which colour to use when I’m painting. I don’t have any definitions of colour, such as: green represents this, etc. Also with my patterns, if there was a tree I saw in my dream, I try to bring a pattern that is similar to the tree I saw in my dream. It’s not necessarily a tree that we normally know. It’s something that represents a tree.

VS: With Pane Rima Rakakomba (There’s Too Much Darkness), which we discussed earlier, there is a real feeling of being overshadowed by the tree. These leaf-like patterns make you feel you are being shrouded by leaves. On some physical level, we recognise that feeling in the painting. I’m interested in the art you were taught when you were at the BAT Visual Art Studios in Harare. What was the approach there?

PZ: We studied European art. We had just one day a week, because we were doing research, when you had to know about impressionism, and then you do a painting that is similar to impressionism. But then the other four days, you sit there with a human being sitting there, and you draw. We only had that one day to look at expressionism or impressionism.

VS: When you are moved by the inspiration to paint, and it might take four months to make a painting, how do you make space for that slow and intuitive painting process? Especially knowing you have a small child, I’m fascinated as to how you make time with a very immersive, demanding practice, which children don’t usually facilitate (laughs all round) … “With difficulty” is fine as an answer.

PZ: It’s very difficult. But if I don’t do it, then I’m a very frustrated mother and wife. They have to give me space. My husband has to give me space, and I give him space too. But my little child doesn’t give me space. So, when she was one, I used to make her sleep for an hour, nap time. And during that time, I’d go to the studio. But now I have difficulty making her sleep, so I take her with me. I give her canvas and some paint. But she wants me to get involved. So, we work together.

VS: Well, you must be congratulated for keeping your energy and focus against all the distractions of motherhood. It is fascinating work and a great show.

• Portia Zvavahera: Zvakazarurwa is at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, until 25 May 2025.