Fruitmarket in Edinburgh’s 50th anniversary year of exhibitions continues with Portia Zvavahera: Zvakazarurwa (Revelations). Zimbabwe-born, Zvavahera combines painting, printmaking and batik to create a personal cosmology featuring figures, creatures, shapes and shadows. Working in her home studio in Harare, she weaves together dreams, fantasy and stories about herself and her family into densely-patterned, intensely-coloured and mesmerising works, using repetition and pattern involving massed central forms over extended colour fields. 

Focusing on dreams, fantasy and figuration, this exhibition, Zvavahera’s first in Scotland, draws on her engagement with eros, intimacy and female experience. The earliest works combine images of childbirth and motherhood, while more recent works are more closely aligned to certain dreams, in particular a recurring one in which she struggles to protect her family from malign forces, ‘bad energies’, which take the form of rats.