Dog

Today's Featured Sculpture

Dog by Enos Gunja

Genre: Animals

Weight: 15kg

Stone type: Steatite

Dimensions: 28 x 19 x 39 cm

Sculptor information 

Enos Gunja is from the Kore-Kore tribe and is forbidden through his family totem to eat lion meat.

After reaching Standard 6 at school Enos worked as a brick maker and became eventually a hunter fir a tsetse fly control team. His position was to guard the people spraying to eradicate the tsetse fly.

He discovered his talent at carving while at Tengenenge Sculpture Community. Enos says his ideas come from his imagination. Enos uses his logic; a figure is carved out of a stone where it lies like a figure wrapped in a blanket. He says it is not seen by anyone only he can see this imaginary figure, like a figure in a pool, until it is carved out of the stone starting from the top of the head until the feet are revealed. He is considered to be a great poet and storyteller and enjoys dancing.

Enos carves in the mountain where he quarries his own stone. The finished work is taken to his house at Tengenenge where it is polished and oiled and exhibited outside. Enos’s sculpture was included in an exhibition, which toured the U.S.A. Enos believes the course of his life depends on the will of his ancestral spirits. Once, Enos says, he became possessed by a spirit and became restless and disturbed. He was cured only after beer was brewed to propitiate ancestral spirits and offerings were made to the local Mondoro medium that is possessed by the spirit of a lion, Shona belief. His sculpture sometimes reveals inner perplexity. Grotesque and tortured, with bulging eyes and beaklike mouth with the nose omitted or divided into horns. Other sculptures are serene and natural with soft rounded out and sensual curved elements.