In a short video interview released as part of “Zvakazarurwa” (Revelations), Portia Zvavahera’s exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, UK, the painter describes a dream she had while pregnant. “I saw rats coming to attack me in my sleep,” she said. “It felt like I was under a tree in that dream. And there was so much darkness.” Shortly thereafter, she reconstructed the dream in a painting titled Pane rima rakakomba (I) (There’s Too Much Darkness), 2023. “The rats are coming,” she went on to say in the interview, describing the dream. “I don’t know what they wanted to do. But it was like a bad energy I felt during that time… something that wanted to take what I had in my womb… It was very terrifying.”

The visual language of dreams, as Zvavahera’s paintings seem to show, is more impressionistic than realistic. In Pane rima rakakomba (I), the figure of the recumbent pregnant woman and the rats that attempt to assail her are painted with heavy splotches of ink, showing no fidelity to the verisimilar dimensions of either humans or animals. There’s also the added effect of a repeated patchwork of meandrous lines, as though an ominous mass of netting is cast over the nightmarish scene.

The Zimbabwe-based painter is uninterested in re-creating the story of the dream as a “narrative event”; rather, she is after the “ambiguous imagery and concentrated energy” of her night visions. So says the show’s curator Tamar Garb in a catalog essay, offering a clue as to what lends the artist’s work its vitality. In the show, which travels next to the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, some paintings on view draw from Zvavahera’s time in the hospital, during a prior pregnancy. One such image, Labour Ward (2012), is a consideration of three female figures, lying on their sides, in various degrees of painful abandon. Not much can be made of the expressions on their faces, but the contorted bodies are sketched to reveal a sense—even evoke a sound—of intermittent agony.

In the past decade and half, the key shift in her painterly language is the sinuous, expressive lines that appear within her images, often in the foreground. She achieves these layers by combining painting and printing techniques, using ink, crayon, or molten wax, all worked or stencilled onto her canvas using a domestic iron or metal spoon. Paintings like Tavingwa Nezvehusiku (We Are Hated By the Night), 2018, and Vachengeti vangu (My guardian), 2020, illustrate this ebullient amalgam of painting and printing, showing an intelligent dazzle of floral, concentric, or star-styled bursts that surround amorphous figures in a jigsaw of poses. Foliage serves as inspiration for these shapes, as do laces, especially those used as veils for brides in church weddings; she had been fascinated with “white weddings” when she was younger.

In discussing her practice, the painter speaks almost exclusively about a spiritual import. The blank space she leaves in the paintings, for instance, “always needs to be filled by a higher power.” But the triumph of Zvavahera’s work is to make the tension between a dreamworld and the everyday apparent to the viewer. The recognizable gestures of her figures betray narratives of revelation, hinting at what she has discovered of her unconscious state.