Exhibitions highlight artistry of pottery and bugs
Edward Njenga with Mau Mau detainee sculptures. Photo/Margaretta wa Gacheru
Two truly ‘down-to-earth’ exhibitions opened in the past fortnight in Nairobi. One is all about bugs living in the Brackenhurst indigenous forest in Limuru and the other’s about mud and clay molded over millennia up to the present day.
It’s the molded mud exhibition that’s the most multi-faceted and complex. ‘Pots and Identities’ was curated by the National Museum’s Dr Freda Nkirote together with Lydia Galavu and other museum staff.
Sponsored by several international agencies including the British Institute of Eastern Africa, French National Agency for Research, IFRA and the Museum itself, the exhibition includes element of ethno-archeological findings dating back to Neolithic times when clay pots were already being used, their remains having been dug up by diligent archeologists and used to map out ‘ethno-linguistic identities and social boundaries’.
In East Africa, that meant the mapping of historical migrations of the Cushites, Nilotics and Bantu peoples.
What makes this show so fascinating is the way it combines historical and contemporary dimensions of mud and clay.
It also examines various forms of creative expression, so that what’s displayed are not only fragments of centuries-old utilitarian pots.
It also features modern-day ceramics, some of which are also utilitarian but often have aesthetic features, such as Magdalene Odundo’s beautiful soup bowl which she silk-screened using magenta-coloured images of her own family.
The bowl is part of a whole set of China that the award-winning ceramicist created in 2001 and donated to the Museum in 2008.
At the same time, some of the contemporary ceramics are also sociological studies, as in the clay pieces of Edward Njenga, the 94-year-old ceramist-sculptor whose figureens date back to the 1960s when Njenga was working as a social worker among the poor in Eastlands.
Njenga’s miniature sculptures also have historical as well as artistic and sociological significance as they vividly depict Kenya’s Nairobi-based working and poor people.
He’s realistic three-dimensional portraits of local lifestyles, some of which are extinct like the Secretary typing on her Olivetti typewriter.
But others reflect ongoing realities suffered by the poor, such as the unlicensed vegetable seller—a young lad—being grabbed by a city council askari.
The son of a potter, Njenga first had his hands in the mud as a child, assisting his mother to make clay for her to use in her pot-making. At that time, and even now, most ceramicists were women.
Details of how he later had opportunities to develop that talent are depicted in the new biography launched on the exhibition’s opening day.
Lynnette Kariuki is the university lecturer who documented Njenga’s unparalleled life in ‘Telling it in Clay; a biography of veteran sculptor Edward S. Njenga.’
It’s a wonderful story about a man who not only worked closely with poor and disadvantaged Kenyans for many years and also chronicled their lives in clay.
He was also a detainee during the Emergency, an experience he graphically depicted in clay but which is, unfortunately, not part of his segment of this well-rounded exhibition which features a range of other contemporary ceramicists, among them another award-winning artist Waithera Chege as well as Beatrice Ndumi, Lilian Barengo, Juliana Igoki and the Kibichiko Potters among others.
The other down-to-earth exhibition is a photographic one by professional photographer and documentalist, Eric Gitonga. Entitled ‘Dudus of Brackenhurst.’
The show is displayed at the Brackenhurst Community Centre, given that Gitonga snapped all his insects on site where more than a decade ago, the Centre brought in a forester who proceeded to uproot all the exotic trees , replacing them with all indigenous trees and shrubs.
The result was that the terrain is filled with indigenous bugs and other wildlife who feel at home among the vegetation these creatures have consumed for generations.
The natural wealth and flourishing wildlife, including insects like the long-legged fly and shield bug in Gitonga’s Dudus show speak volumes about the value of sticking with indigenous vegetation.
Finally, almost simultaneously, exhibitions of paintings by Mike Chalo opened early this week at both the Talisman Restaurant and the Banana Hill Art Gallery.
Chalo worked hard to create paintings which have something in common with the sculptures of Edward Njenga seeing as both artists portray the lives of working people struggling to make ends meet on a daily basis. More to be said on his shows next week.
