Jackson Hlungwani (1923–2010) was a sculptor, spiritual leader and visionary whose work occupies a singular and distinctive position within South African art. Born in Limpopo, he learnt the fundamentals of carving from his father and received no formal art training. Instead, he developed his craft through a process of spiritual discipline, direct observation of the natural world and an intensely personal theological system. This system combined Christianity with Tsonga-Shangaan ancestral belief and direct visionary experience, providing both the iconographic programme and moral framework for everything he made.
Hlungwani created not only individual sculptures but entire sacred environments. The most celebrated of these is the site he named New Jerusalem, near the village of Mbhokota, which he constructed over many years as a place of worship, reflection and cultural gathering. Within this environment he placed carvings of fish, birds, human figures, prophets and composite creatures that seem to grow organically from the timber used to make them, their surfaces animated by the marks of tools and the grain of the wood. The figures combine formal inventiveness with a spiritual intensity that operates independently of academic tradition or art-world convention.
Hlungwani caught the attention of a wider public in the 1980s when he was included in major exhibitions, with his work subsequently added to significant South African collections. He was awarded the Order of Ikhamanga in Bronze in recognition of his contribution to South African culture.
Today, he is regarded as one of the most original and spiritually compelling sculptors to emerge from South Africa, an artist whose work challenges any simple account of modernism, tradition or institutional art history.
