To The US, With Chisel And Mallet

Kenya Tue 27-03-2007

To The US, With Chisel And Mallet
By Ali Zaidi

On the first day of the inaugural Wasanii International Artists Workshop, held in 1997 in Elsamere on Lake Naivasha, Kenya, participating sculptors went out to forage in the wilderness that makes up most of the property. They came back lugging various logs, stumps and other ‘found’ pieces of wood.

The largest of these were two stumps, wrestled to the main lodge's frontIrene Wanjiru - wooden sculpture 1front lawn by Irene Wanjiru, then a 30-year-old mother of three and a last minute inclusion to the workshop.

Two experienced Kenyan painters who witnessed this spectacle remarked, in Kikuyu a local dialect, “Well, well… women these days have certainly become ambitious – bet you she won’t even scratch the surface of that heavy wood…”.

Wanjiru, herself half Kikuyu, heard and understood, but kept her own counsel. Two weeks later, in the words of workshop organiser Rob Burnet, two sculptures– Reluctant Passenger and Hairstyle, had "come leaping” out of that wood.

On the ‘open day’ marking end of the workshop, Reluctant Passenger, a remarkably unsentimental depiction of a mother with an irate infant on her back, was snapped up by one of the workshop’s patrons, the mistress of Oserian, the legendary ‘Djinn Palace’ on Lake Naivasha. The unassuming daughter of peasant farmers who enjoys physical labour, is often described as a restless soul, so much she cannot sit still for more than a few minutes.

Without ever seeking publicity or making enemies in what at times can be a somewhat "political" prefession, she has within a decade, carved out an impressive reputation in Nairobi's art circles. From July 17-August 23 2005, Wanjiru, now 39, will be the Artist in Residence at The Carving Studio and Sculpture Centre in West Rutland, Vermont state in the US, also called the Green Mountain State. Originally a quarry, now-turned sculpture centre, it is steeped in memories of some 150 years of hard physical labour.

The centre is located around a dozen abandoned quarries, where once crews of Swedish, German and Italian immigrants cracked jagged slabs of white marble from the rock face. During the late 19th century, this site had employed some 300 quarrymen.

American journalist Kevin Kelley, in a local Vermont paper, describes the 300-acre site belonging to the Gawet Marble and Granite Co, as "..a remnant of Vermont's more muscular past. This is where hammers, chisels and drills echoed for nearly 100 years as the quarried rocks were shaped for use as walls, floors and foundations in Vermont and surrounding states," he writes.Two other Kenyan sculptors, Maggie Otieno and Morris Foit have also been hosted by the Carving Studio, so the locals are no longer strangers to the Kenyan idiom, as it were.

But one can safely predict that Vermont sculptors are going to be somewhat stunned by the sheer energy that Wanjiru can unleash by the age-old combination of human muscle power, chisel and mallet. She is excited at the prospect of working with power tools on really big blocks of marble.

“Foit told me there are blocks there the sizes of an elephant! People say marble is hard to work, but they say that of stone too,” and she knows all about that. Wanjiru is also looking forward to participate in her longest ever workshop/residency. “Wasanii was two weeks; now, I’ll have four whole weeks to do nothing else but sculpt. That will be a blessing…,” she enthuses.

It will also be a well earned break; for the past two decades, she has been a full-time homemaker as well as bringing up four children, the oldest is now 19 – not that you could tell that by looking at her. Besides a full regime of household work and sculpting, Wanjiru regularly also exercises and lifts weights. Vermont, you have been warned; expect elephants!

Posted By: African Colours

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