By
Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 4 August 2018)
‘Me, Myself
and I’ is the title Naitiemu Nyanjom shamelessly gave to her first solo
exhibition held this July at the British Institute of Eastern Africa.
It’s a show
that reflects the complexity of this Kenyan woman who, at 24, isn’t just a visual
artist as her ‘artist’s statement’ suggests. She’s also an academic who just
completed a five-year Bachelor of Science (B.Sc) degree in civil engineering from
University of Nairobi.
But Naitiemu
is also a woman with sufficient humility not to talk much about her years at ‘uni’
where she often studied till the wee hours to retain the same perfect scores
that she’d consistently received in secondary school at Moi Girls, Eldoret.
“I’ve always
loved doing art whenever I had the chance,” says Naitiemu who went to work with
the acclaimed Kenyan artist Patrick Mukabi while she was still at university.
She only spent a few months at Patrick’s Dust Depo Art Studio, but she did that
while she was also simultaneously active with studies on campus. And in both
spheres, she excelled. She even managed to take part in various group
exhibitions: from Alliance Francaise, Circle Art Gallery and the Kenya Art Fair
to the UN Recreation Centre, Delta House and Abuja, Nigeria.
Naitiemu
says she was fortunate to study art and design in secondary school. But on her
own and with her fellow Kenyan artists, she went onto strengthen her skills in
painting, woodcut printing, photography, image transferring, mixed media and
collage.
All of these
techniques were apparent in her first solo show at BIEA. Image transferring was
especially visible in her two black and white ‘Self Portraits’. Each conveyed
contrasting emotions. One showed the same image of her face, repeated across
the large canvas and looking sober and subdued. The other set of cross-canvas
images were also of the artist’s face, only this time filled with joy and the
freshness of natural beauty.
And on both
canvases, she’d written words suggesting thoughts correlative with her
expression. On one she wrote lines like “I am not who you think I am” and ‘You
don’t know me’. On the other she wrote positively that ‘I have never been sad’.
This pattern
of pairing her paintings in a dialectical style is particularly apparent in her
twin sleek-shaped divers. Both works are entitled ‘7.6 billion in people in the
world: I am woman’ I and II. But one wore a crown of thorns while the other a crown
of regal triumphant. Both women were carefully delineated against a bright
yellow backdrop which was filled with image-transferred antithetical headlines.
The lines
glaring out of the thorn-crowned diver’s work were all about women’s
oppression, making reference to everything from gender inequality and domestic
violence to sexual harassment and how the world has failed to educate girls. Ironically,
she seemed to be swimming upward as if resisting the downward drag.
But then
juxtaposed to all that apparent negativity is the regally crowned woman
affirming ‘power’ and ‘freedom’.
These two collage-like paintings seemed to reveal the artist’s recognition of both the obstacles and opportunities that women currently face.
These two collage-like paintings seemed to reveal the artist’s recognition of both the obstacles and opportunities that women currently face.
Yet one wall
of the show was filled with a set of smaller works whose titles gave greater clarity to
her message than the works did themselves. Filled with questions about the
meaning of life, death, fate and free will, she nonetheless remains open to
fearlessly question further.
The works on
one wall in her show that doesn’t treat her paired paintings in dialectical
style were entitled “A shadow of his silhouette: An abyss of Nostalgia.”
Naitiemu was clearly close to this man. The silhouette is of her father whose
passing is still fresh in her heart and mind.
So just as
it was her choice to claim her family name, Naitiemu also made the choice to be
herself. And for her that self is sincerely an artist first and foremost. She
may have the scientific skills and the academic background to do other things.
But ‘Me, Myself and I’ was the measure of a major breakthrough for Naitiemu.
And while she’s deeply grateful to Mukabi and for her weeks at Dust Depo, she
moved out a while back and now works from her studio at home.
“My Mother
gave me the name Naitiemu which is Maasai for ‘One who satisfies.’ That was
because my father was so exciting about my being born that he threw a
celebration in which everyone feasted and went home satisfied,” said the artist
who once had an English name to which she no longer relates.
This is the best article written about my works. Thanks Margaretta!
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