Ancestry

Overview

“I came across a series of engravings representing a couple of their paternal an- cestors, I decided to do crossbreeding backwards. I Africanized this pot-bellied bourgeois and his melancholy wife. Our ancestors had to meet, they who could not even conceive that their blood would one day be mixed with that of the fierce Queen Zinga of the Congo. I want my children to be proud of this colorful heritage. It is the demonstration that humans are barely getting to know each other. That the world is not just white and black. Our ancestors are the colors of the artist’s palette. The colors of which the divine breath makes the unique work that each of us is. But they also link us to the dawn of time.

To this continuity of human life that started from somewhere in Africa, has strayed into cold and distant lands where only forests are black to meet again a few million years on the banks of the Congo River. We are the soul of the world, like the trees and stones that Africans worship as well as the gods. I wondered, delicately putting tribal paintings on the faces of these somewhat stiff ancestors, what they thought. I think they were laughing looking at each other. All the ancestors of the world are benevolent. So I poured a little beer on the floor for their health, as it is in the lands of my ancestors. “

"I live on a disaffected farm by the lake of Naivasha, in the hearth of the great Rift Valley. It is an African garden of Eden. The coexistence of these two worlds is an endless source of inspiration: my art reflects both the raw beauty of African wilderness and the African art of recycling, stitching and mending. My sculptures and collages are made of bits and pieces that I collect during my daily expeditions: cotton threads, handmade ropes made of straw or rubber, plastic bags stranded on the lake shore. Sometimes I combine local materials with handmade fabrics such as Japanese Washi paper. I like to put together stuff that does not belong together.

I am a self-taught artist, free from the formatting of art schools. I love creating works that produces stimulating and eclectic elements. I’m fascinated by natural laws that govern of the cycles of life and the power of nature. My interest in these transformative and regenerative processes come from a desire to understand the mystery of ageing and death as a process that is crucial to our existence. I slyly transform everyday articles combining reductive methods of shredding, twisting with constructive processes of tying, weaving stitching and dyeing. I give objects a new life and shape, while trying to preserve the integrity and the origin of each element of the process. I also paint and draw, and I like to switch from one to the other, but this is another story. Miles Davis said that jazz is the perfect combina- tion between discipline and improvisation. I like that. Most of my artworks look like Totems, I tried to honor nature and reconcile man and nature by assembling various textures that I sow together as a surgeon would do after a serious injury."

Maliza Kiasuwa