Harare → Seattle · September 2026
Bottle caps, broken glass and poacher snares, rebuilt into the animals themselves.
A collection of works just arrived in Seattle: various sculptures by the self-taught Zimbabwean artist Johnson Zuze, made entirely from what Harare throws away, and found items that would otherwise be waste.
“Transforming waste. Honoring life.”
Every work in this collection began as rubbish. Zuze gathers what Harare throws away, then builds each animal by hand, wire by wire, at the scale of the living creature. Nothing is cast, moulded or repeated. Each piece is one of one.
The Artist
Johnson Zuze
Born in 1985 and self-taught mixed media artist, Zuze works from Harare and Chitungwiza, building sculpture and installation out of what the city discards — wire, plastic bottles, glass, rubber, electronics and scrap metal, much of it collected from the dump grounds near his home.
His most charged material is the snare: wire loops set by poachers to catch wild animals, recovered from Gonarezhou National Park and the Save Valley Conservancy and rewound by hand into the animals they were made to kill. The work has been shown internationally, took the Zimbabwean National Arts Merit Award in 2016, and filled Gallery Delta in Harare for the 2018 Animal Kingdom exhibition.
- Born
- 1985, Zimbabwe
- Studio
- Harare & Chitungwiza
- Recognition
- National Arts Merit Award, 2016
What the work is made of
The armature
Every sculpture starts as a hand-wound wire skeleton, built without a mould. Much of the wire is recovered poacher snare — the material of threat, turned into the animal.
The skin
Bottle caps, crushed plastic, broken glass and rubber are threaded and lashed into the frame to give each animal its color, hide and weight. Color is collected from found items, never painted on.
The detail
Discarded electronics, tooling, cable and scrap steel become horns, tusks, hooves and faces. Salvage decides the detail, so no two pieces resolve the same way.
The Zuze Collection
Available
Dimensions, weight and price supplied on request. Each work is unique and sold as a single edition.
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