Lucas Sithole
Sithole’s affinity for wood extended beyond its material qualities to the aliveness he ascribed it. To the artist, it was analogous in spirit to the human and animal figures he sculpted. Deeply responsive to his medium, Sithole did not bend the wood to serve an image but rather bent the image to serve the wood. That said, he never made preliminary drawings, never anticipated what form a branch might take. His many figures, such as From the Fields, were not so much made as found, given formal expression, worked to a polished shine. “Sithole felt with his hands,” art historian Eliza Miles wrote, “the shape of the creature that he had to liberate from wood.”
b.1931, Springs; d.1994, Pongola
Among Lucas Sithole’s most astonishing works are those he sculpted from indigenous wood. “A tree,” he told writer Peter Anderson, “is like a human being…the branches represent the veins.” Then – “Stone is just a material.” And, later – “I always try to get the inside…” Where clay broke too easily, stone gave too little, and metal lacked warmth, wood offered the artist not only an ideal medium but the suggestion of form. He worked on salvaged branches, finding his many figures hidden beneath the bark. While Sithole’s sculptures made in other materials share a solidity in weight and form, his wooden works are more often slight and long, just as the tapering boughs from which they are carved. The artist spoke often of an Eswatini myth his grandmother told him, the story of a snake who lives in the rivers but longs for the sky. On the rare occasion its powers allow it to rise up to the clouds, the snake appears as a tornado, twisting upwards, only to fall back down to the river as rain. “This is why some of my figures are long,” Sithole said, evoking the fable’s unfulfilled desire, “they are longing for heaven.”