MANDLA©️

The Mandla print©️, highlights aspects of our childhood and shows that something that you thought you decide pay attention to actually sticks with you and it is a blessing as it has inspired our favourite element of this design. 

If you look at this print, you will see what resembles a mother looking at a child. When growing up, whatever home we went too as children, it was likely that we would see a mini sculpture that looked like a mother looking at their child created in what seemed to be stone.

Upon further research, we found that, these sculptures were created by local shona artisan out of serpentine stone, and there are many interpretations of this design varying from artist to artist. The piece is hand carved and shows a faceless mother and child embracing in an abstract from. The piece is usually set in the original colour of the stone. Shona are a bantu ethnic group native to Southern Africa, primarily Zimbabwe. 

Shona artist have become well known for this type of abstract stone carving and ti is not only limited to a mother and child, you will sometimes see other family members in the abstract piece.

We wanted to recreate this is the form of a 3 dimensional futurism artwork based on the Naya Print. You could argue that is is the Naya print looking down at her child. 

With another element, we wanted to capture another angle with what you could argue to be the Naya print. A lot of african art sculptures and drawings of women often show the profile of the woman and we wanted to represent this in this piece. The profile of the african woman can be found up and down the continent.

 So why the name Mandla?  

For this collection, we wanted to name some of the pieces after the new generation. The new generation is our future, and with the collection representing futurism the choice of names just made sense.