Jonathan Sölanke Gathaara Fraser is a multidisciplinary artist based in Kenya working across various media as a means for paying careful (and especially caring) attention to his environment. Some of these modes of practice include drawing, printmaking, plant pressing, audio-visual work, and writing. Across the various disciplines he pursues, Fraser works to extend his attentiveness and care into the world around him. This attention has developed into an ongoing inquiry regarding relationships between the alternating lenses through which we view the world; dream and consciousness, intuition and uncertainty, context and form. His interest in generating a novel “image” has led to an artistic output that seeks to renegotiate ideas of discipline, material and process to invite opportunities for interventions into and overlaps across established meaning and association. Fraser works primarily through drawing to experience first-hand the laborious and delicate work required to think and feel through an idea so that the action of drawing is inextricable from the object of “a drawing”. His appreciation for the tactile process of creation leads him to an embodied space where the experience of drawing may take on additive meaning. Drawing as in “to pull in towards an axis” so as to possibly envelope into itself a wide and varied expression of a dynamic system.
Fraser studied Fine Art at Kenyatta University and counts his experiences as a studio assistant as well as local workshops toward his art education. In 2021, his first solo exhibition, There Is A Time and A Place, was held at Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi. His second solo presentation with the gallery, The Past Will Be Like The Future, takes place in 2025. He has also shown work in numerous group exhibitions notable among them 2025’s Notes on Friendship: Breaking Bread, a group show organised jointly by the Nairobi Contemporary Arts Institute (NCAI, Kenya) and Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, Tamale (SCCA, Ghana). In 2023, Fraser was an artist in residence at 32º East, Uganda and in 2025 will be an artist in residence in Zurich facilitated by Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council.
