MANDY’S BLACK AND WHITE MAGICAL DOTS

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 8.2.23)

Mandy Bonnell has been in and out of Kenya since 1990 when she first met Yony Waite (cofounder of Gallery Watatu) who invited her to Lamu to assist her in setting up the printing press at Yony’s Wildebeest Workshop. “That trip changed my life forever,” the artist told BDLife at the opening of Mandy’s second solo art exhibition entitled ‘Fragile Things’. So named because she has focused on seemingly incidental yet delicate things, like stems of grass and petticoat hems. In fact, the entire exhibition reflects Bonnell’s fascination with delicate designs of everything from punctuation marks to wildflowers, like the Queen Anne’s Lace, to the actual textile, lace. Her meticulously drawn lace patterns are of particular significance to this show since they not only reflect her intersecting interests in the textile and the floral designs that feature so prominently in practically every piece of lace that she could find. They also embody her concern for the unsung women who created the lace with painstaking care for perfection and botanical accuracy. “I have always been interested in women artists,” she says. “After all, I am one!” she adds with a twinkle in her eye, noting she has been a professional artist for more than 25 years. Having studied fine art at the Royal Academy of Art in London, she received two degrees, one in painting, another in printmaking.

“I never liked painting much. I prefer drawing,” says Mandy who reveals the intensity of her interest in that skill in this incredible exhibition. Pieces like her series of diptychs (with one half, featuring elegantly drawn pieces of lace, the other, with various punctuation marks all lined up in horizontal rows and vertical columns) are all hand-drawn with sharpened graphite pencils on 100 percent cotton rag paper handmade either in Italy, France, Japan, or UK. Mandy admits that her kind of work is slow-going. One only needs to see it to appreciate how such a show could take several years to assemble. But her drawings, which she describes as mixed media including collage, is only a fraction of what goes into such an exhibition. Being a scholar and professor of fine art at Bath University, she felt compelled to do research. She did it for this show everywhere from Venice at the Burano Lace Museum to London at the Natural History Museum to New York at the Cooper-Hewlitt Museum of Textile and Design.

In a follow-up interview, Mandy explains that this exhibition emerged, in large part, as a response to an exhibition of lacework and embroidery that she saw at the Cooper-Hewlitt. Realizing that all this extraordinary handwork was done by women, she notes that times are changing such that women textile artists are no longer being defined as craftswomen. They are increasingly being recognized as fine artists.

But for centuries, millennia even, women’s artistry has been unsung, unnamed, ignored and taken for granted. She recalls how she found the notebooks left by Mary Delaney, a woman of the 17th century who collected wildflowers by the hundreds and assembled them so impressively that they were picked up by the Natural History Museum and it is there that they have found a permanent home. Yet in her lifetime, that botanical catalogue wasn’t seen as scientifically significant. It was just a woman’s hobby. But now, her name will not be lost; now she is one among the thousands of so-called craftwomen whose identities will be lost forever. Bonnell just air freighted a new Printing Press to Kenya for artists to use freely. It resides at One Off Gallery