At its inaugural exhibition this year, Circle Art Gallery in Nairobi is playing host to a horde of talent across Africa, including Ethel Aanyu (Ugandan), Liberatha Alibalio (Tanzanian), Pamela Enyonu (Ugandan), Fetlework Tadesse (Ethiopian), Sandra Wauye (Kenya) and Birhane Worede (Ethiopian), in an exhibition dubbed New Visions.
Upon clearing art school, Enyonu says she did not start practising art immediately. She did a couple of different jobs to get life experience.
She worked as a teacher, and in a newsroom and for seven years, she worked as a copywriter. She comes in a package of experience and maturity in terms of understanding her art and the role it is supposed to play, not only for herself but also for her viewers. She does not impose but rather allows her viewers to derive their understanding from what they see.
Her experience in the commercial side of creativity had a part to play in her general outlook on life.
“The work gave me so much stress but it paid the bills and allowed me to see what power looks like, when people have it and it also allowed me to study the transactional nature of a standard workplace,” she says.
She describes her art as women inspired, stating that she has always been surrounded by strong, incredible, smart, adventurous and generous women. The maternal presence in her life is strong through the line of her mother. She was raised up by all her mother’s sisters.
“They were the ones who first taught me how to weave baskets, to make things. I am surrounded by really incredible women. I was in a world that was telling me that we were weak, exploitable, and stupid, and that we were not creatures of awe because of how we looked and the social class we were born in.
"For me, that did not feel like the truth because all the women around me were amazing people, who went on to do incredible things. The narrative about women that I was experiencing seemed so wrong and untrue. If you follow the work that I have done in my life, it celebrates those strong women that I have experienced at deep and personal levels, it is about finding places in history to leave markers.”
The piece called Ideke is inspired by the goddess of fast growth and first breakthroughs. When she was thinking about the idea of building new myths for girls who look like her, she wanted characters she liked that were a reflection of her journey and that she could keep going back to.
Times of transitions became a guide; sitting her final exams, getting her first job, and falling in love are some of her examples, and the initial nervousness during these moments was the background setting driving her to her art.
Her second portrait is called Akipi which means water, in Ateso.
“I considered the whole of East Africa keenly with this one,” she points out.
“I always tell people, there is nowhere in East Africa that I can go to and lack a bed. I have never paid for accommodation anywhere in East Africa. And so, when I thought about imaging my home, without centering the colonial borders, I needed an impression that would match the imagery. I settled on lakes whose sense of direction is similar to that of mango tree roots.”
In creating her own myths on canvas, Enyonu was working with the realisation that the people who are responsible for creating the mainstream myths, were also responsible for telling us these stories that had already partially destroyed our education systems.
“And so I asked myself that if there were stories that were lost through the passage of history, what could I do to bring some of these stories back, hence Akipi in itself is a map of somewhere but then again it is nowhere.”
As an artist, her series in this exhibition is an attempt to answer questions on spiritualism.
She employs the use of mixed media artwork using tissue paper, acrylics, gold-leaf and pen, in a manner that is subtly warm and moribund with the colours.
Her paintings at a glance draw a lot of reference not only to her personal and literal inspiration but also to nature in a restful poise. They are as comforting as they are calm to the eye.
Enyonu’s art is a cheeky pop at all things considered mainstream, be it education, religion or spiritualism, each painting has a background story that is louder in defiance than the subversive nature of her artwork, each brush stroke tells a story of her aspirations as a woman in art.
“A lot of girls do not get to experience girlhood or womanhood. It is cut short by either free domestic labour, pregnancy, or by circumstances which force them to become adults.”
Dreams of an Insomniac by Sandra Wauye on display at the Art Circle Gallery in Nairobi on February 1, 2025.
Photo credit: Wilfred Nyangaresi | Nation Media Group
For Enyonu, her paintings act as custodians to the part of girlhood that is lost to adulthood. Her paintings range from $4,000-$4,800 (Sh517,000 to Sh620,000). Wauye's paintings range from $1,200-$2,700 (Sh155,000-Sh348,000).
On the other hand, Wauye is showcasing four of her murals; The Light That Drew Me Here, Dreams of an Insomniac, Companions of the Earth and Feather to Skin, all of which are fusions of human and animal forms against vibrant, multicoloured and undefined environments.
She got into active painting just after Covid. She does art full-time but says her parents want her to practice both art and civil engineering. Prior to that she was working as a civil engineer, which is her professional background until one day, she dropped out of it and followed her heart into art.
It is a similar conflict that many a good artists have had, one in which art calls and another in which one has to eke a living.
Unlike most artists whot have a running theme in their heads before painting, Wauye, mostly thinks about colour which forms the pillars of her works.
In this exhibition, she says that care was a running theme when she was layering her colours, the care for living things especially was transcendent in her mind shown by the presence of dogs that formed a large part of childhood, symbolising the companionship that man has with domestic animals.
She prefers oil-based paintings on canvas which allows her to layer her colours, a stylistic preference. This is because oil-based paint takes a longer time to dry, thus allowing her to simultaneously work on several paintings at ago.
Her colours shimmer on the borderline of bold, nothing screams out or shies away, and her murals are a perfect symbiotic symmetry, between bold and conservative, in the layers of pastels of colour.
