This piece continues Josh's ongoing (i’m)migration series and illustrates the Shona proverb “Kushanda sejesa,” to work like a weaver bird. Where most birds gather loose twigs, the jesa strips grass and green reeds, tying and knotting them into secure, hanging nests, a labour Josh connects to the story behind the naming of his own home city. Long before the city that would become Harare existed, the Shona chief Neharawa was known for a different kind of unceasing vigilance: he never slept, always alert against attack from the vantage point of what is now the Kopje. His neighbours called him “Haarari,” he does not sleep. In 1982, two years after independence, the city took his name in place of its colonial title, Salisbury. The piece began as red cotton fabric, its pattern hand-drawn and inspired both by the animals that share the weaver bird's habitat and by the bird's own nest-building. That pattern was exposed onto the cotton using cyanotype, then primed with varnish before the bird itself was painted in acrylic and charcoal, and sealed under a final coat of varnish, stretched over a wooden frame. Cyanotype, acrylic, and charcoal on cotton.
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