Drawing on the remarkable collection of the David Livingstone Centre at Blantyre, Sybren Renema and Timmy van Zoelen have assembled over 20 wooden objects and tree fragments for display at Glasgow University’s Hunterian Museum. Hoping to shed new light on the Scot whose missionary travels and “disappearance” in Africa gave him almost mythical status, the artists have set themselves the task of assembling the scattered fragments of David Livingstone’s ‘funeral tree’, the African muvla tree under which the explorer’s heart was buried by his loyal servants after his death in 1873 in present-day Zambia.
This work has been commissioned by The Mutual for the Hunterian Museum as part of The Mutual Charter in association with Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2012.
