The Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera responds to a dream she had during her own pregnancy across a series of canvases of which this is the largest. A supine, big-bellied form is superimposed on a tree rhythmically batik-printed with abstract leaf shapes. At the dreamer’s feet, rodent-like and spermatozoic purple creatures represent malign forces. At the dreamer’s head (filled with all the colours of the canvas) a more luminously filled angelic outline kneels over and extends its impossibly elongated arms beneath the sleeper.

This is not Joseph’s dream: or is it? Joseph’s dream is at once that of the one human father of God, in history, specific as to time and place. At the same time, as the unique account in Matthew’s Gospel of messianic conception and birth, Joseph’s dream represents a universal threshold of cosmic and metaphysical promise, the fresh heart of any knowledge of God and self.

For Zvavahera—influenced by both her Shona culture and her Pentecostal Christianity—as for Joseph and his scriptural ancestors, dreams are the vehicle through which God speaks. As ‘revelations’, not just consolations, they potentially disclose otherwise unknowable territory of the play of good and evil.

We may see through Zvavahera our passage’s darker aspects. Jesus’s human father Joseph is beleaguered by fear—his troubles, too, swirling around a pregnant body; problems unresolved by taking Mary as his wife. Just as with his namesake Joseph, named in the preceding genealogy, the consequences of his dream, whilst resolving the initial dilemma, lead directly into the unveiling of human evil (Genesis 37). The revelation of God’s coming into the world disturbs its false order in ways which do not simply palliate: it is the news of his passion as well as of cosmic redemption. This conception, enraging regnant powers, will lead to immediate threat to the holy family and their exile to Egypt against the backdrop of child massacre.

However, dreams are also—for the artist—open matrices, inviting her to an artistic and spiritual labour through which she will move into meaning and battle against fear: each painting a potential victory (Garb 2024: 24, 57). Her art records this labour visibly in its transparency to the process of its production: amorphous shapes, loose layers, spatterings of ink, repeated motifs recalling associated repeated motions. So too Joseph’s once-dreamt dream holds within itself a lifetime, and all our lifetimes, of consequence in interpretation and action.

References

Garb, Tamar. 2024. ‘Painting/Printing and the Poetics of Revelation’, in Portia Zvavahera: Zvakazarurwa, ed. by Fiona Bradley (Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard Gallery).