FF Projects is pleased to announce Yet The Great Life Continues, a duo show by artists and FF Projects alumni Fadekemi Ogunsanya and Agnes Waruguru, and the fifth presentation within FF Projects' year-long residency at Alára.
The use of textile is perhaps the most obvious affinity between the two artists' work– a parallel between two opposite African coasts, East and West. Contemporary interpretations of their countries’ traditional cloth become an eloquent means through which to reveal inner landscapes. Kanga for Waruguru, Adire Eleko for Ogunsanya.
Waruguru sustained a commitment to working with fabric very early on in her artistic journey, during her studies abroad in the United States, a country worlds away from her native Kenya. What began as a way for her to muster up a sense of home in a foreign environment, quickly devolved into a deliberation on what home even meant to her. It dawned on her how much of that sense was occupied and shaped by women. She concluded that her own sense of home making was made up of serene and comforting gestures, like serving tea, gardening, gifting. Natural pigment came to express that in her work, connecting her work to domestic memories of cooking and being cared for by the women in her life. In works such as Window Seat Reprise and You and I, saffron represents luxury. Turmeric and indigo heal in To commune with the stars and Seeee.
For Ogunsanya, Adire Eleko has similar implications, having been historically shaped by the labour and knowledge of Yoruba women, and with the textile’s association with the domestic space. In I Thought I Had Forgotten You, the protagonist is seated, embroidering a piece of cloth, in a meta imagining of “the relationship between making and remembering, how the slow, repetitive gestures involved in textile work can create space for memories to return.”
This move into the interior is both a literal and metaphorical expression. The figures appear physically enclosed in domestic settings, evidenced by the presence of brick walls, while simultaneously representing the artist’s psychological interior, obliquely revealed to the viewer.
Pervasive motifs further offer a way to encrypt this emotion. And thus repeated patterns take up center stage in this exhibition, magnified, and speaking for themselves, unobstructed by her usual figural protagonists. These patterns’ meanings vary from context to context, at times imbued by Ogunsanya’s own messages and interpretations. In A Bounty Surrounds My Heart, for example, the spiral (typically representing the cycle of life) takes on a whole new meaning as the figure triumphantly lifts it above her head, relegating it from the symbolic into the physical realm. A sentiment reflected in Waruguru’ account: “There is darkness but it doesn’t last forever. I think the work shows the cycle of turmoil, and working through it, and in the end coming out with a new perspective. Holding on to some hope.”
In Waruguru’s work, Kikuyu folktales and proverbs figure prominently, dispensing advice on how to navigate life’s trials. Kikuyu sayings become mantras, titling each “textile collage”. Notably, Gatuma kainagia murigwa (A Little Darkness Causes All to Dance) refers to a proverb denoting a dance typically performed nude, by moonlight, during initiations. As both artists can attest: sometimes darkness must be experienced before freedom can be fully known.
The title of the show, Yet The Great Life Continues, points to this exact journey in the work. Whatever one may choose to call it; transformation, the soul journey, becoming, the ongoing process of self discovery– it is much less a linear path than a cyclical one. In C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, the author describes repeatedly encountering emotions he believed he’d already passed through, while recognizing that every time he returned to them he was never exactly in the same position. Both bodies of work are preoccupied with this question, insufflated with the inner life, unspoken thoughts, and growing pains of the artists. Introspection is laid bare on cotton, pigmented vestiges of an endless shedding and becoming.
