Damien Hirst and I are in a small wooden boat on Lake Mburo in southern Uganda. “I tell you what,” Hirst says, pointing out an enormous hippo wallowing a short distance away. “That would make an amazing barbecue.”
It is Hirst’s first encounter with a hippo, and his first visit to Africa. We have been in Uganda for two days, and our stay in this national park is a brief diversion from our progress westward to our real destination: a disused copper mine in the foothills of the Ruwenzori mountains. Hirst is there with four others to look at the place; I’m tagging along to record the trip for a Radio 4 documentary.
We’ve been brought here by one of Hirst’s closest collaborators, Rungwe Kingdon, who runs Pangolin Editions, a Gloucestershire foundry which casts work for more than 300 sculptors, including Sarah Lucas and the late Lynn Chadwick. If you know Hirst’s work, chances are you know Rungwe’s: Hymn, the vast brightly coloured anatomical model which dominates the central hall of the new Saatchi Gallery, is one of many Hirst pieces made in Rungwe’s Stroud headquarters.
Kingdon — a genial man with a beard so extravagant that Hirst remarks at one point that it “makes him look as if his head’s on upside down” — grew up in Uganda, where his father taught art at the university in Kampala while researching a book on African wildlife. After Idi Amin’s rise to power Rungwe’s family were forced to leave, and 30 years later he has decided to do something to contribute to the cultural life of the country. So he is in the process of setting up a sculpture foundry at a disused copper mine in Kilembe, a small town in the southwest of the country, which will offer Ugandan artists their first chance to make work in bronze.
The idea is that when the foundry opens in a couple of years it will offer European and Ugandan artists a chance to interact and collaborate. Rungwe persuaded Damien and another of the artists he works with, Angus Fairhurst, to fly out and have a look at the place and meet some of the local artists. Hirst was enthusiastic.
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“When Rungwe said that he was setting up a foundry in Uganda and taking people over there, I thought it was a great thing to do. I come from Leeds; it’s very different, but I’ve often thought it would be great to do something back where I came from, so for Rungwe to do it . . . it’s a brilliant idea,” he says.
When we visit the art school at the university in Kampala, the gulf between Brit Art and Ugandan art quickly becomes apparent. Steven Mwesigwa, an art lecturer at the university who is also involved with the Kilembe project, tells us that resources here are so scarce that students have to buy their own paint. Hirst is taken aback when Mwesigwa adds that they have recently begun making their own canvas to save money. It’s a revealing moment, too, when the students are shown photographs of Hirst and Fairhurst works for the first time, and both men take obvious pleasure in explaining how each piece was conceived. A sculpture of Fairhurst’s, Mnemonic Table, elicits giggles of admiration and disbelief: “Freedom! We don’t do this here — around here they’d call you mad!”
We arrive at Kilembe after a long drive across country, punctuated by regular stops to look at wildlife and an apparently ceaseless barrage of gags and bad puns from Hirst and Fairhurst at the back of the bus. It’s a spectacular place: a verdant green valley dotted with the rotting carcasses of industrial machinery, the snowy peaks of the Ruwenzori mountains just visible in the distance. As we crunch our way across the old spoilheaps and explore the shells of buildings that will eventually become a foundry, Hirst keeps up a steady flow of questions to Kingdon: when will it start, how many artists will come here, what sort of work will it be doing. And Fairhurst is quick to point out the unlikely similarities between western Uganda and Stroud: steeply wooded hills, an old industrial estate, and — of course — high heat and humidity.
Clearly the visit has made a strong impression on the two artists, and when I ask whether they’ll be back I’m surprised by the enthusiasm of Hirst’s answer: “I’ll definitely come back and make work here. Yeah — do something.” It’s tempting to suggest that a trip of this kind might be a critical moment in an artist’s career, but when I ask Fairhurst what sort of effect he thinks it will have on his work he is dismissive: “I don ‘t know. I’m still processing the first 20 years of my life, thanks very much.” Hirst takes a similar line: “No idea. Let’s do an interview in 20 years, then I’ll tell you.” So we may have to wait a few years for the first Damien Hirst pickled hippo.
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Damien and Angus’s African Adventure is on Radio 4 on Monday at 11am