Pamela Phatsimo SunstrumGrandpères, 2020
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s painting practice intricately weaves together mythology, science, and speculative fiction to examine themes of identity, memory, and historical narrative. Working primarily in pencil and oil on wood, her layered compositions often feature recurring female figures situated within imagined landscapes that evoke both ancient worlds and futuristic terrains. She draws from a wide spectrum of references, including classical mythology, Romantic painting, postcolonial history, and quantum physics, to create visual spaces that feel at once intimate and monumental.
In ‘Grandpères’, Sunstrum brings together diverse historical and cultural sources to construct a composition that operates across multiple temporal planes. The painting references two works by James McNeill Whistler: an 1891 portrait of the Count of Montesquieu and an 1860 etching of men smoking pipes at the edge of a harbour surrounded by tall ships. These historical echoes are layered with imagery of geodesic domes, popularised by Buckminster Fuller and associated with utopian architectural ideals. According to the artist, the work is structured to introduce many depths of space, from far-off vistas to the immediacy of the foliage in the foreground, creating a sense of visual veils that suggest movement through time and space. The figures in Grandpères are imagined as travellers, perhaps even time travellers, whose garments and gestures contain subtle nods to ancestry.
