I believe art is an ancient language that we use to communicate with each other into the future. A year ago, I took a magnificent journey with a friend. We went to see some prehistoric art. We went deep into the desert of Niger to look for art that had been created tens of thousands of years ago. The journey was filled with long conversations, Tuareg music and our whimsical shadow dances, and lots of laughter.
As we drove deep into the Sahara, we found delicate drawings scratched into the gray rock faces, art made at a time when the Sahel was filled with people and their cattle, full of lakes and forests and home to hippos and giraffes. We saw engravings of characters made with intricate detailed patterns, a sign that whoever had carved them knew one day they would be seen and admired. These ancient voices from the past spoke of the wealth and the bounty that existed, showing the importance of making, recording and representing ourselves.
Art is that ancient language that we've been using for longer than written text. We've left messages for each other using art. Messages that travel across the expanse of time and culture, reminding us where we come from.
As long as I can remember, I've been making art and I've always made art about women. I've created figures with female bodies that sometimes look like pregnant creatures or wounded and then repaired women. I’ve made hybrid humans and even fierce feminine machines. All to show how the female body is a powerful sight onto which culture expresses its feelings of worthiness, of desire or distaste, of divinity or decrepitude, of belonging or loss. The images I make, like the ones I saw carved on those ancient desert rocks, are essentially the representation of the presence of the female in all of us.
Growing up in Nairobi in the 1970s, Kenya had every appearance of a happy, wholesome, modernized country. We had fought, reclaimed and celebrated our independence from a tyrannical British rule. But there were and there still are old skeletons and colonial traumas rattling in our closets.
When I was ten years old, whilst our second president was in office, there was an attempted and failed coup. The president behaved increasingly paranoid and authoritarian, and he placed restrictions on all types of freedoms of expression. People began to disappear. Journalists. Preachers. Artists. Teachers. Even my relatives who are vocal about the government began to vanish. Kenyan people were rendered invisible, small and silent. And I wanted to get out. And I did, through my mind, by creating art and imagining places I could go where I could communicate freely and fearlessly.
Within a few years' time, I found myself in New York and though I immediately felt far and removed from my country, my mind remained clear and determined because I'd carried inside of me the language of my ancestral home. The cacophony of this big new city was disorienting at first. It was unlike dusty green Nairobi. But with time, I found my creative rhythm, gathering all manner of pictures and knickknacks, some sentimental, others unfamiliar, collecting discarded objects, old pictures, even letters. I cut and assembled them, and as I glued them together, I put myself together.
Slicing out pictures from magazines and books found on the streets of the city, I transformed them into large paintings with figures that were disjointed but whole, distorted, but strangely beautiful. I stuck these fragments into imaginary environments that seemed frightening and violent, but always alluring and otherworldly. It was my way of creating order and grace, a way to remember who and where I'd come from. Mending and healing in order to triumph.
After harvesting so much paper and producing so, so many collages, I felt it was time to step back and let go. Time to purge and shred this excess paper and these materials that I'd collected for years. And I did. Turning it all into a dark, thick paper clay, which I used to create my first large sculpture, a reclining woman with open arms and her eyes facing forward, a figure who could see a new beginning on its way, titled "She's Got the Whole World in Her."
As I visited and returned from my childhood home, I came back with all types of rocks and branches, pots and beads, and each shell, each bone, each feather I found, I used in the work, weaving back that deep connection to my home soil. I sculpted these giant earth queens and placed the small mementos inside of them, archiving my memories and experiences with family and friends.
Our bodies once carried all of our art. Our bodies are our oldest museums. I made these sculptures to represent our fractured and remade histories and our connection to each other and our red mud. Each of them a portrait of the resilience and the diversity of African women formed from these particles of mother continent, shaped like old trees, shaped like my sisters and my grandmothers, like anthills and women friends, like the coral reef and the Great Rift Valley. Shaped like me. I gave them large elaborate feet so they could stand steady, strong.
As I spent more time reconnecting with this home I'd come back to, I conjured up more supernatural characters, this time in bronze. Like my smooth, shiny water woman, a version of the mythical nguva of East African lore, a creature with the power to delight us, to instruct or destroy us, who speaks directly to sea creatures and the water itself. I created another sea goddess and named her "MamaRay," with mystical shell eyes that see into the past and know the future, with wings so wide they could carry us across the ocean.
And then next I created a great woman crocodile with striped armor, like long words cut into her body to remind us of our land, our land that remembers us.
In 2018, the Metropolitan Museum of Art invited me to their first commission ever to create new sculptures that would sit in the building's facade, these niches that had remained empty for over a hundred years. I created four seated deities. All wearing golden crowns of light, robed in rippling bronze garments made to reflect the sun. The first with a bright disk over her mouth, the second with a golden mirror on her eyes, the third with a radiant crown, and the fourth with a circular light beam on her forehead. These works stood for tranquility, dignity, Africanity and the feminine divine.
A few months after they were placed in the niches, the entire world descended into a pandemic. And it's during this time, in this crisis, that the serene guardians continued shining expressions of hope and calm and healing for us all.
(Applause)
This journey I began by drawing and sculpting many different versions of women like myself is what allowed me to move forward. It's what gave me permission to re-examine my home and my family and my country from a distance. It's making art that continues to remind me what freedom I was so desperately seeking. For me, for us, for anyone who works for our rightful place in the future. And even if we begin our journeys at first to escape, the return path is always inside of us. If we want to exist in the homes we thought we never belonged, we have to create new powerful images for them.
When I'm working, I know I'm using this ancient language and I know that I'm where this language was born. I know we have all been related for millions of years and that we need to take care of this one vessel that connects us to our roots, our roots in the Rift Valley, or the Sahara, or the shores of the Nile, somewhere on African soil where we left traces of our first journeys.
Art is that ancient language that we've always used to remind us where we're from and where we're heading. I hope to always make art that empowers women, that points us to the future, to Africa, where art originated.
Thank you.
(Applause)
