Peterson Kamwathi

Peterson Kamwathi Untitled Digital Print 650mm x 480mm

This remarkable print by the Kenyan artist, Peterson Kamwathi whom I work with in London, was born of a collaboration with the Kenyan poet Shailja Patel for the South African based project Dialogue Among Civilizations The Art of Human Rights you can read Shailja's poem What we want on this link.

I think Kamwathi's print makes its point with economy and subtlety, demonstrating the strength, beauty and vulnerability of human communities.



There is a very illuminating London article/interview with Kamwathi by Karen Dabrowska which gives a real sense of both the man and his work.

Peterson Kamwathi explaining Kenya through woodcut prints and icons

and we produced a full catalogue of the artist's last show in London with an essay by the SOAS art historian, Elsbeth Court, and an interview with fellow artist Sam Hopkins together with images and details of all the works in the show. Do check it out...

...Matter of Record... Catalogue

Brushes with Memory

Curating an exhibition in a place away from your regular abode is an experience I am familiar with but one that never fails to excite me. In many ways it is the perfect way to experience a place as you encounter both local people and other visitors in the space that you have staked out.

Witness: the spectre of memory in contemporary African art is my current exhibition here staged by Ed Cross Fine Art Ltd in the beautiful city of Edinburgh as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival. The show is at the English Speaking Union’s pleasant little gallery at 23 Atholl Crescent – in a lovely 18^th century part of the city not far from Princes St. It features five artists – from four African countries: Soly Cisse from Senegal, Lovemore Kambudzi from Zimbabwe, Peterson Kamwathi from Kenya, Richard Onyango also from Kenya, and Dominique Zinkpe from The Republic of Benin. These are all artists I have dealings with – I have selected them because I love their work.

In this large and highly ambitious reduction Woodcut queuing figures from the abortive 2008 Kenyan elections can be made out amid a mass of ballot boxes.

Memory is the theme of the exhibition – its presence is felt in all acts of creation – but I am interested by the specific roles it plays with the five artists represented and here I will write about three of them. Both Peterson Kamwathi and Lovemore Kambudzi have consciously or otherwise assumed the role of guardians of memories for their respective countries Kenya and Zimbabwe. Kamwathi with his thoughtful, beautifully executed and focussed work. Each marking aspirations, disappointments and travesties of justice. His work grounded in his country but expanding out in to the wider world and referring back to the past almost as if he is painstakingly assembling a language with which to explain what it is to be a human or indeed an animal,

in this world of ours which worships at the alter of systems of leverage that deliver power and or wealth to the few usually at the expense of the many. Where corporate, individual or national greed are ever present and the sins of many a father apparent if one looks deep enough. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance – there is vigilance in Kamwathi’s work that would be dogged if it were not beautiful. Existing behind the unflinching record of human failings is a strong belief in the soul, a kernel within humanity in Africa or anywhere on earth, that must be protected, nourished and celebrated.

Lovemore Kambudzi from Harare works from memory and his own sketches – he paints what he sees going on around him – the good, the bad and the ugly, in most cases applying one colour at a time across often large canvasses. In 2008 during one of the lowest points in Zimbabwe’s recent history when water supplies failed, Cholera stalked the country and political oppression was particularly brutal, I suggested that he and his family come to Kenya to take shelter for a while – a few days later the message came from his wife – “Lovemore wouldn’t know what to paint in Kenya – there are some extraordinary things going on– he can’t leave now - he has to keep painting what’s happening”. Kambudzi has only one subject – the living breathing stumbling, tragic but often smiling, Zimbabwe. It’s a circus that he cannot miss – he must not only witness but record – and his recording is detailed and intense - the expressions on the numerous characters that pepper his works are very specific and acutely observed - even the extras in his “cast of thousands” works are individuals, often betraying their emotions through a hunch of the shoulders or the tilt of a hip.

No one would describe Richard Onyango as a political artist, yet whilst his subject matter – mostly his own life both real and imagined, is completely at odds with that of Kamwathi and Kambudzi; his work too, is profoundly informed by politics and social phenomenon. Like Kamwathi, Onyango is driven by a vision of a just Africa. Where people are able to play their part in society and live in dignity. In Onyango’s case it is an extravagant, unfettered Utopian vision. It is a world where very overweight women of all colour (and presumably men too?) can defy gravity and pole-vault majestically through the air or belt round athletics tracks in record time.

It is a place where people are accorded proper respect regardless of their colour or body type – where women are as powerful as men and more than capable of defending themselves if needs be#

(note the pistol on his late girlfriend Drosie’s belt and the sword on his new fantasy lover, Deborah Teighler once dubbed “the fattest woman in America”). It is an anti-obsolescence world where machinery, engineering and vehicles are revered and well maintained in to old age. It is also a place where people are aware that “dreaming” is a creative process – for Onyango believes that people get what they look for in life. You could say the artist is living proof of his belief in the power of the mind as it was his decision as a child to remember everything he saw (in the absence of a camera) that he attributes to his “photographic memory” and the ability to recall childhood scenes with a high degree of accuracy. Others might attribute it to a variety of autism (is this merely a neurotic and tedious need for labels?) but his clear recollection of his own decision to “record what he was interested in” is compelling.

Have a look at the catalogue of the exhibition...

http://www.edcrossfineart.com/ECFA_Catalogue_and_price_list_Witness_the_Spectre_of_Memory.pdf

Kenya, Zimbabwe and the spirit of artists

Peterson Kamwathi - Charcoal on Paper Jacob Wachira Ezigbo (Kenya) Oil on Canvas

It’s been a sad and grim last few weeks in Kenya though there are many signs of hope. Strange for me as I was in Zimbabwe until about ten days before the election, a country where a coffee cost over a million Zim Dollars and people could not get access to any cash with huge queues outside banks and a withdrawal limit of 10 million Zim dollars per day. I was fairly bullish about Kenya, putting aside any worries from watching opposition campaign rallies in Lamu, where youth had charged around brandishing sticks and looking like they might do some damage if they lost. Interestingly, my daughter went to an opposition party in Lamu just before the election and her friend there gleefully mentioned that they would burn down houses if they lost the election – mercifully that hasn’t happened in Lamu where people are generally very peaceful, but as you will know the Rift Valley is another story all together.

Kenya’s media has been extraordinary throughout all this chaos and violence, they have been united in their continuous and vigorous calls for peace, in fact a friend has suggested that – if peace does prevail in Kenya - that the Kenyan media as a whole be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. As the days pass politicians from both sides of the divide look increasingly selfish and incapable and are, I think, viewed with increasing contempt by many people. It used to be the case under Moi that most people disliked politics – for better or for worse Kenya’s new infatuation with democracy has caught a cold. Looking back, given the ethnic makeup for

Kenya multi party politics Western style has been a recipe for disaster, am not advocating a return to dictatorship but questions should be asked about this model’s suitability to countries like Kenya where ethnicity is a major factor and whose boundaries were draw with rulers wielded by British civil servants.

What has all this got to do with contemporary art? A great deal, actually. Art of all kinds can be a mirror in which societies can observe themselves and promote breakthroughs on thought and feeling. You only have to turn on the television in Kenya to find groups singing peace songs for their country and Eric Wainaina’s song about his country become a second National Anthem.

Artists here have influence. (and unlike the West their messages are not compromised by great affluence) Visual artists are usually less powerful than performers, but nevertheless they make a crucial contribution – especially in Zimbabwe where performance that is critical to the regime is not normally allowed; leaving visual artists, viewed by the authorities as the lunatic fringe, to take up the fight against injustice. There is much that I would like to say about Zimbabwe but in the interests of my continuing visits there and especially in the interest of the artists themselves, discretion will, at least for the time being, be the better part of valour.
.


I came back from Harare convinced that the most important work to collect there was that which reflected historic contemporary issues. I bought, through Gallery Delta, fourteen small works by Cosmos Shirizinomwa which effectively document the notorious Murambatsvina “operation clean up” in which thousands of homes and businesses were destroyed after the 2002 elections– in most case by their owners under threat of the military. This operation which went on all over Zimbabwe delivered a body blow the morale of the people from which they have yet to recover.

I also bought these two wonderful pieces by Munyaradzi Mazarire a young mixed media artist whose I had noticed before and who is still a student. He is among several compelling young artists shown by Gallery Delta, among others are Tafadzwa Getai, and Admire Kamudzengerere. I shall write more about these artists in due course.

Mazarire’s work speaks for itself the Perspective with Ladder work is one of a series of ladder pieces, as is Exercise 10 feet which to me speaks of a recently prized education system going to waste in contemporary Zimbabwe – the work, devoid of people, the complex equation on the blackboard rendered useless, the legs of the chairs and desk, like most of the population, left dangling.
Munyaradzi Mazarire ( Zimbabwe )- Exercise 10 feet - Mixed Media - 48 x 53cm

Munyaradzi Mazarire (Zimbabwe) Perspective With Ladder - Mixed Media - 48 x 45 cm

Coming back to Kenya; two artists whose work has reflected, possibly anticipated, the current chaos and bloodshed – Peterson Kamwathi and Jacob Wachira Ezigbo. The former with his work charting the abortive constitution making process – see the images of the Bulls below in an earlier posting, and even more so, his beautiful large charcoal drawings of sheep illustrated here above, and featured at his show mounted by Ramoma at La Rustique in Nairobi last year, with the implements of war and death in their shadows.

Ezigbo has show in Nairobi at the moment which opened before the elections – his paintings are both beautiful and dark – there is an utterly authentic taste of the grimness of urban life for the poor in Kenya as well as the universal realities of hope and beauty, creativity, (suggested by the images of birds and flowers) despite hardship – red paint hurled at the canvas mimics blood, hands pointing two ways now suggest to me choices between two extremes of love and hate as well as dismembered body parts possibly referring to the Mungiki sect activities and the brutal police

Jacob Wachira Ezigbo ( Kenya) Oil on Canvas

response in the last six months of last year. Ezigbo is also a great print maker as well as painter and for me it is the iconography of his work that sets him apart from much of Kenya’s artists.

I sign off with a plea to all of you who are not in Kenya – please keep faith with Kenya and don’t let the images of brutality that the world has seen recently cloud your vision of a country that I guess has it all – the beauty and the horror, the rich and the poor, the sea and the mountains, fifty something different tribes and specimens from practically every country on the globe (my English self included) , we hope that the events of the last few weeks will be part of Kenya’s very painful growing pains. Kenya is not the picture post card land that our tourist agencies with their “Jambo Bwana’s” would like to suggest, it is an interesting , vibrant developing country with major social problems and inequalities of wealth combined with many historical social and political injustices that need to be aired and addressed urgently, I guess a good look at Jacob Wachira Ezigbo’s work will explain a lot.

P.S. Since writing this I have heard that Jacob has been forced to flee his Mathare Valley home, he is currently organizing relief supplies for his fellow displaced residents - if you want to make a contribution to the relief effort click on this link http://www.kenyaredcross.org/donate.php?subcat=91

Peterson Kamwathi's Kenyan Bulls

Woodcut plates and Stage Proofs, Peterson produces editions of up to two prints per woodcut.

for further information contact ed cross on ed.r.cross@gmail.com