Wangechi Mutu shares her deep relationship with nature through her artworks. Mutu is a Kenyan-born artist who lives both in Nairobi and New York. She is a mixed-media artist whose works range from collages, drawing, sculptures, to films. Mutu creates a powerful figure, which is a hybrid of the female body, plant, animal, and machine forms. This figure reflects not only environmental issues but also several social issues, such as cultural identity, femininity, colonial history, and global consumption.
Wangechi Mutu: She Walks, 2019. Photograph: Wangechi Mutu/Victoria Miro. https://www.victoria-miro.com/artists/9-wangechi-mutu/
One of Mutu’s sculptures entitled She Walks (2019) was made from tree roots, soil, and other natural materials. This sculpture depicts the female body, that looks like wearing boots. The hair extension in her arms was made based on the sacred crown of medicine women or shamans in some traditional African groups. Mutu’s sculpture suggests the power and self-determined characteristics of women, while at the same time speaks about human existence that is rooted on earth.
Wangechi Mutu, Backlash Blues, 2004. Courtesy of Artist and Saatchi Gallery. https://www.saatchigallery.com/artist/wangechi_mutu
In Backlash Blues (2004), Mutu uses mixed media, such as photo collage, acrylic, and ink on mylar. Her painting is mesmerizing, portraying an apocalyptic figure squatting on the ground full of weeds. In this painting, Mutu combines the pattern of dyed fabric and traditional fashion illustration resulting in an uncanny figure that is tight close to nature.
Mutu considers herself a “city girl with a nature brain”. She remembers her childhood in Kenya where she played in her family’s garden and met nature. The feminine figure on her artworks was influenced by her school memory, in which all the students and teachers are women. She absorbed the power and symbols of femininity that she encountered in the school, but also questioned “why do we worship the image of the woman, but denigrate the actual human being?” This inquiry has inspired her creative process even a long time after she graduated. Mutu also explores African history, fashion magazines, and medical diagrams as inspirations for her arts.
Her awareness of the cultural identity and post-colonial issues in Kenya led her to travel to New York as a University Student. In her early artworks, she created mixed media art, made from cut-out fashion magazines, vintage illustrations, and completed it with watercolors painting. Her works are captivating and colorful. Currently, Mutu’s exploration is getting wider, including sculpture, photography, and films. She also broadens her concern on how Black and female bodies have been photographed, packaged, consumed, and represented to the viewers.
Her recent exhibition (2021), displaying her two bronze sculptures: Crocodylus and MamaRay, was organized at Gladstone Gallery. This exhibition featuring the elegant and powerful hybrid female-animal figures that draw viewers’ attention to femininity issues. The hybrid figures of human and animal have also taken up in many other fiction stories and folk tales around the world. It is usually used for giving backstories or acceptable reasons for humans’ brutal behavior. However, Mutu’s figures have a different aim in portraying hybrid figures, which is to represent a chimeric relationship with the power, poise, and dynamism of womanhood.
Wangechi Mutu’s stories can be watched in one of four new films from Art21’s summer 2021 programming.
Wangechi Mutu: Between the Earth and the Sky | Art21 “Extended Play”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaL8zDealmU