Tabitha wa Thuku: Seasons within a Season: Circle Art Gallery
In the 35 or so years of her artistic career, Tabitha Wa Thuku has been journeying homewards.
Lives and works in Nairobi
Seasons Within a Season, a solo exhibition by Tabitha Wa Thuku serves as a carrier for stories that characterise the artist’s life. Born to small-scale coffee farmers, it is apt that Wa Thuku marks time in the language of seasons by creating vivid visual anchors that intertwine approaches of observation, memory and imagination. This exhibition primarily highlights paintings and sculptures from over three decades of her artistic practice, with the earliest work from 1989, and the most recent paintings and sculptures from 2024.
Wa Thuku’s innovative and adaptive approach is one born out of making do; fashioning beauty and utility out of necessity. In her own words, “It is the calling of a farmer’s daughter, in the absence of other things, to make things”
This impulse of using what is available to her, and a quiet and conscious attention to the rhythms of nature endure over the artistic seasons that mark both place and time in Wa Thuku’s life. Time spent in Mchana Coffee Estate, Dandora, Kikuyu, Banana Hill, Westlands, Kitengela come alive in her work in distinct styles and colour palettes. From sculpture in wood, to fired clay figurines, to paintings on media ranging from paper, canvas to UV netting, Wa Thuku boasts a variety of working methods. This use of diverse substrates for her creations is facilitated by her invention of tools, repurposing household items such as brooms into custom brushes. Her methodology is unto itself, her images forming as they will; a rejection of the often formulaic ways of making paintings that is prescribed in conventional schools of thought. Wa Thuku seeks to resist commercialization of her work by allowing it to just be.
Some seasons were brief, others over a decade, but each has marked a period of expansion; of ideas, of herself and of the work. In all the seasons, the thread of home and belonging carries through.
Kitengela Season
In a recent move to Kitengela in 2023, Wa Thuku’s palette has shifted to atmospheric blues and whites, a reflection of the differing quality of light and openness in the landscape.
Westlands Season
This is perhaps the artist's most well-known season. Vibrant and colourful, this season is characterized by its deep forest colours, trees, rivers, farmlands and houses. Wa Thuku returns to her roots as a farmer’s daughter here, thinking about sustenance, reciprocity with the land and the labour required to work with it in order to be fed.
Kikuyu and Banana Hill Seasons
These two seasons blend into each other distinguished by their texture, an earthy palette and some figuration. The artist explores vulnerability, violence and change in these seasons, with some of her notable work speaking to the 2007/2008 post election violence.
Born in the year of Independence, Tabitha Wa Thuku began her creative practice as a young, self-taught artist and one of the only female artists of her generation. With a career of over three decades, Wa Thuku has developed a painterly language unencumbered by convention, her works distinguished by a brooding palette which ranges from subtle browns to rich reds. Wa Thuku originally studied Textiles and Clothing Technology at Kenya Polytechnic, then from 1996 to 1999 she attended the Buruburu Institute of Fine Arts. She has undertaken various workshops and residencies to develop a wide range of techniques, demonstrated in her extensive body of work. In addition to her own artistic production, she has also worked as an art educator, teaching and mentoring children and young artists. Wa Thuku has exhibited regularly throughout her career in Kenya and abroad, including in The Netherlands, Italy, Hong Kong and Denmark. In 2022 her work was featured in a retrospective exhibition alongside Yony Waite and Theresa Musoke at Circle Art Gallery. Her work is included in private and public collections in Kenya, including those of the National Museum of Kenya, the Safaricom collection, PwC and MMC Africa Law.
