Pamela Phatsimo SunstrumThe Bridge, 2021
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses drawing, painting, installation, and animation. Her work draws on mythology, geology, and cosmological theories to explore the entanglement of time, identity, and belief. Positioned within a broader network of artists engaging with postcolonialism, neocolonialism, and transcultural identities, Sunstrum's practice foregrounds imagination as a radical mode of inquiry. Her narrative landscapes appear at once futuristic and ancient, shifting fluidly between representational and fantastical depictions of volcanic, subterranean, and cosmic terrains. These spaces hold multiple, often conflicting layers of history and meaning, suggesting that the past and future coexist in a state of constant becoming.
In ‘The Bridge’, Sunstrum introduces the opening scene of a narrative unfolding across a series of panels in her studio. The painting depicts a charged encounter between two figures on a bridge: one, a returning traveller, weighed down by the burdens and spoils of a long journey; the other, a sentinel, waiting to receive them. This moment of encounter, poised between tension and recognition, hints at the emotional and symbolic negotiations that take place in acts of return. Drawing on her fascination with cinematic language, Sunstrum notes: “I have been very curious about classic cinematic techniques… the prolonged crossfade as an interesting visual tool for conveying narrative and insisting upon a particular kind of stylised drama.” The bridge becomes both literal and metaphorical, a threshold across which histories, desires, and possibilities pass – held in suspension, yet open to transformation.
