The Crisson & Hind Fine Art Gallery will celebrate 10 years in business next month.

Located above the Crisson jewellery store at 71 Front Street, the commercial gallery showcases and sells the work of some of the finest stone sculptors in Zimbabwe.

The business was founded by Dusty Hind, who had built up the Aardvark marketing agency over the previous three decades, and was ready to try something different. It is a joint venture with Crisson.

Mr. Hind had long admired the distinctive work of the Shona people of Zimbabwe and had built up a collection of 25 sculptures, with which he started the gallery in 1999.

Visitors to the gallery today are struck by an array of African faces and wildlife depicted in meticulous detail in hard stones including butter jade, verdite, leopard stone and cobalt stone.

The sculptures are the work of gifted artists continuing a stone-carving tradition that goes back centuries, working amid the southern African country's grinding poverty, using little more than hammers, hand-made chisels and sandpaper to create their stunning works of art.

The gallery is open between April and December. In the January to March period, Mr. Hind ventures to his beloved Africa to not only buy direct from the sculptors, but also to get to know them and their families, and to occasionally help them find the high-quality stone they need. Though there are many sculptors, there are only about 30 who are "masters", according to Mr. Hind, highly skilled people who can spend months hewing elephants or dancing girls from a single piece of stone.

"As we buy direct from the sculptors, we can sell at half the price of galleries in the United States and Europe," Mr. Hind said.

He added that the gallery, whose customers are about 25 percent local and 75 percent international, had established a devoted clientele and he pinpointed the reasons for its success.

"Anyone who comes up here knowing nothing about African art may expect to see something ugly, but when they see the quality of what we have they are surprised," Mr, Hind said.

"People who are knowledgeable about the Shona people come here expecting to see abstract work. They may not be aware of the breakaway group of the Fine Artists who don't do abstract and they will be surprised.

"Then there is our location, on Front Street, above Crisson, which gives us kudos.

"But one of the greatest advantages of being here is that husbands and wives tend to shop together when they're on a trip to Bermuda. In North America, they never shop together because of the pressures of everyday life. Choosing artwork to put into the home is a decision that they have to make together. So we have an advantage over a gallery in Manhattan, for example."

Mr. Hind has shipped sculptures to customers as far a field as France, Germany, South America, Switzerland and Mexico. He recalled one extraordinary exchange with a couple who wandered into the gallery and bought two pieces by their favourite sculptor, Lazarus Tandi. "They came in and said, 'so you're the bastard'," Mr. Hind said. "They said they collected Tandi's work and they'd heard that someone had been buying up his best pieces. That was me."

"When we filled in the invoice, we discovered they were from Johannesburg."

Other customers are so keen, they insist on helping Mr. Hind unpack the boxes when he receives a new shipment, so that they can have first chance to buy.

Buyers like Mr. Hind are very welcome in Zimbabwe, which is in a state of economic disaster. The country is beset by hyperinflation, an unemployment rate of more than 90 percent, as well as a devastating HIV problem. Since the country dumped its currency in January this year, when inflation was measured at 231 million percent and a daily newspaper cost 500 trillion dollars, the population has been allowed to use foreign currency, including US dollars.

Mr. Hind said one of the things he loved about Africa was the happiness of the people, despite a lack of material possessions. "The African people have a closeness of extended family and a closeness to the Earth that is magnificent," he said. "They don't tend to have the lust for wealth that we have in the western world and they are happy."