BY FIONA MOTSA
MBABANE– Creating lifetime memories for people!
A liSwati woman who has ventured into casting has been changing the lives of families in Eswatini for the past five years.
Fundile Hlatshwayo has been creating lifetime memories for people using her casting skills and her target market are parents.
During an interview with this reporter Hlatshwayo said she had seen casting and was in the process of learning but the pandemic helped her to speed up her learning process.
“In 2017, I had a child and I owned a baby shop in Eswatini. When COVID-19 hit I had to be creative to save the business. This is when I actually took casting seriously,” said Hlatshwayo.
Hlatshwayo said she first saw sculpting online and a South African sculptor took her up for a week to teach her this art.
“I was able to learn and come back with the knowledge and people who would supply me the material which is couriered to eSwatini,” said Hlatshwayo.
The artist said her plan was to make sculpting a gift to new parents as she saw a gap at clinics and hospitals that only offered nimble gifts but this would be memorable.
“When a baby is born, I plan on having either their hand or feet sculpted at the hospital as a memory to parents and for their children as well as those who lost their children would always have that little reminder of what was there,” said Hlatshwayo.
Hlatshwayo said sculpting was really a preservation of what is there just using mould and cement and it took her one day only to create.
“In order to curb the pandemic, I got a lot of second hand baby clothes from my customers who were white. I would then wash these clothes and resell them. That is how I sustained my business during the pandemic,” said Hlatshwayo.
The sculptor further mentioned that she was also going into venture into belly casting for expecting mothers to capture that once in a lifetime moment for them.
“I have been able to get my work out into the public using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and now I will be joining Twitter too,” said the sculptor. According to Arts Buzz, body cast or life-casting, is a method of directly taking a mould from the body to produce a sculpture as accurate as a photograph. Thus, creating a three-dimensional copy of body parts or a whole living human being by the use of moulding and casting techniques.
