AfricanColours - ‘Junk Art’ - A Captivating Kenyan Genre

Kenya Wed 19-08-2009

‘Junk Art’ - A Captivating Kenyan Genre
By Margaretta wa Gacheru

“Junk Art” is nothing new to Kenya. Years ago, I saw Turkana herdsmen take my empty coffee cans and transform them into clever little kerosene lamps.

And I’ve met little boys living in Nairobi’s so-called slums take cast-off coat hangers and reshape them into bodies of buses, mini-cars, and matatus (mini-vans) that actually rolled up and down dusty, rocky roads, easily steered by youthful would-be ‘rally drivers’ who had listened to news of the Safari Rally all their lives.

They had also flattened their mothers’ finished Kimbo cooking fat tins to give their buses siding, colour, and contour. And they used old Tusker beer bottle tops for their head- and tail-lights.

^{Junk art by Kioko Mwitiki}

Those Turkana herdsmen probably never thought of themselves as either artists or artisans. And those little boys from Mathare Valley were only making toys for their own everyday fun; that is, until middle men came along and realized there was a market among tourists for those toys.

When Ken Mwingi premiered his “Junk Art” recently at the StoryMoja Hay Festival in Nairobi, he wasn’t aware that junk art has actually become a full-fledged genre in Kenya.

It wasn’t started by Mwingi, nor did it begin with Kenya’s best known proponent of scrap-metal sculptures, Kioko Mwitiki, who is currently in the United States on an artist’s residency at the San Diego Zoo.

Kioko has been most skillful in popularizing junk art, something the Italian art critic Annelise Della Rosa called “poor art” or “the art of recycling”.

But long before Kioko finished his degree in Fine Art from Kenyatta University College, the Ugandan refugee artist then based in Kenya, John Odochameny was using scrap metal to fashion satiric life-size sculptures depicting Idi Amin and other survivors of those years when Ugandan artists and intellectuals were generally known as ‘endangered species’.

And years before the Makerere University-trained Odochameny came to Nairobi to exhibit at African Heritage and work with local artists like Gakunju Kaigwa, Kenyans were recycling junk:

Just recall all the plastic bags used as window shades, the cardboard cartons held together with sisal rope and shaped into people’s makeshift homes, and the rubber tires remade into Maasai walking shoes!

The big difference between the shoes, shades and cardboard homes is that none of these items would qualify to be contemporary African ‘art’. Nonetheless, what the survivors, artisans and artists like Mwingi, Kioko and Odochameny have in common is the concept of recycling of waste materials.

In fact, a wide range of Kenyan artists are moving into what is commonly being called “mixed media” using one man’s garbage as if it were a new medium with which they magically re-work into contemporary African art forms.

Take for instance, Cyrus Kabiru Ng’ang’a who creates peacocks, crocodiles, and other creatures out of beer bottle tops, or Dennis Muragori who uses old zippers, auto parts and pieces of broken musical instruments to sculpt original three-dimensional wall hangings, or Irene Wanjiru who finds old tangled tree roots along the roadside and carves fascinating faces and other forms and features into them.

Then there is Kamal Shah, who in his recent exhibition at RaMoMA Museum of Modern Art, used everything from broken mirror bits, cowrie shells, and trade beads collected over years to create colourful collage art made from materials that most people would consider garbage or just junk.

One of the earliest ‘junk’ artists in Kenya is the country’s first female university graduate from the Margaret Trowell School of Fine Art at Makerere in Uganda.

Rosemary Karuga was the class of 1949, but she disappeared into teaching and domestic life for many years, only to resurface in the early 1990s and exhibit incredible collage art that she made using the paper wrappers from Rexona soap and unga maize meal and shredded paper from old glossy magazines.

Proving that poverty is ultimately not an obstacle to the artist whose urge to create is more powerful than her personal plight, Karuga was a pioneer in the junk art genre, although no one called her work by that name at the time.

But probably one of the best-known recycling agents in Kenya is Kitengela Glass. Started in the 1980s by Nani Croze who works with scores of Kenyan artists and artisans, the Kitengela-based German-born artist recycles broken beer and soda bottles, shaping them into everything from stain-glass windows to hand-blown glass bead jewelry to glass and scrap-metal totems that stand at the front of various institutions around the land.

But Ken Mwingi is a new face on the ‘junk art’ scene. He’s only been working with scrap metal to create functional fine art for the past two year. Previously, the Sagana-born Kenyan was working in the advertising industry and after that, on his own as a carpenter and interior designer making mostly functional works, such as tables, cupboards, and chairs.

In some cases, Mwingi still makes tables and chairs [as when he made a decorative dinner table set “with a tropical theme” for Nation columnist and United Nations editor Rasna Warah], only now, his main medium of production is scrap-metal, otherwise known as junk!

What brought on this major shift in Mwingi’s production process was the first commission he received two years ago from an old friend, the author, art lover and StoryMoja founder-publisher Muthoni Garland.

“I always had the urge to do art, but previously I didn’t think I could earn a living being a fine artist,” Mwingi told AfricanColours during the StoryMoja Hay Festival held during the first weekend in August this year.

Muthoni somehow knew Mwingi had the creativity and imagination as well as the artisan skill in him, for she commissioned him to create a scrap-metal gecko to go on her front gate. She was so pleased with his work that over the past two years, she has had him working for her practically full time.

“She has commissioned about three-quarters of what I’ve produced in the past two years,” he admits.

What’s extraordinary about the work that Mwingi has produced is that it is all made out of junk, materials he says he mostly collects from jua kali garages and junk yards. His art contains everything from old parts of kitchen toasters, cars, computers and bicycles to even bits from an old Mercedes Benz.

Since he made that first gecko for Muthoni, Mwingi has made her everything from a ‘computer man’ that will greet you at her front door to the railing of her staircase crafted at her request on a “communication theme” to decorative stain-glass grills for her bedroom windows.

Most recently, Mwingi took the liberty of reading Muthoni’s first novel, Tracking the Scent of my Mother, and taking it as inspiration for creating a 20 foot scrap-metal mural.

“Ken came to me after completing the mural,” Muthoni recalled recently. “I hadn’t seen the work and I asked him how I would pay for it. He asked me simply to see the mural, and then decide. Of course, I was overwhelmed. It now covers an entire wall in my house.”

Since the Hay Festival, Mwingi has received an invitation to exhibit at Nairobi’s United Nations headquarters at Gigiri where eleven UN agencies will be convening from August 28 through September 3rd.

“I was told that they would come collect all my pieces before the exhibition, and they would cover all the costs,” said Mwingi, who was working to complete two or three more pieces for the UN show at his Woodman’s workshop in Kawangware. Assisting him in the process are welders Freddie Anzeze, Anton Chambugu, and Bob Paul Omtiti and his electrician Peter Ng’ang’a.

For this Kenya Polytechnic graduate who never dreamed he could make a living doing fine art, Mwingi combines the refined skills of an artisan with the imagination and originality of a fine artist. And while his main medium may be ‘junk’, he has proved – as other Kenyans have before him – that one man’s junk is another man’ means of making genius junk art.

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