Wambui Mumbi: I want my art to start conversations and give hope

At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, Wambui Mumbi was holed up in her house in Nairobi, with more time at her disposal because people could not hang out.

Then a 22-year-old fresh university graduate, the digital artist was doing freelance graphic design and academic writing gigs from her house; stuff she had been doing since campus days to make extra cash. 

When she was a Design major at the Technical University of Kenya, she had, because of having been brought up in small-town Central Kenya, come to like frequenting a nearby art studio run by legendary painter Patrick Mukabi to avoid being swallowed by the big city.

“I came from the village and did not want to be jumpy-jumpy and get caught in the city life, and the studio offered me a place where I could go and hang out with those people,” she says. 

“Art became a safe space for me where I could have fun, and be cool, and it did not expose me to dangers.” 

Whatever would come out of it

Although she didn’t feel like she fitted in with the established artists, she says she was happy being there and watching them do their thing. Hers, she tells me, was “pride by association” and it went on through her time on campus.

After graduating, her artist friends had already started doing art professionally and were unknowingly pressuring her. 

“It was not something I did thinking I want to become an artist, but trying to see what will come out of it,” she says, noting that she did not want to be formally employed; a decision influenced by watching her uncle who is an accountant. 

“I decided to do something because I don’t like writing. Let me focus on design and art, what I really want, even if I am not getting paid for it. I am not sure if it is going to work.”

And she focused on it. Art has now become her escape from the outside world, and when she emerges to share it with the very world, it elicits conversation from social media users where she posts her work, to art fanatics who experience it in person at exhibitions.

Take her ‘Grief’ series, for instance. She embarked on the project in June 2022 to highlight the emotional landscape she was in after losing her grandfather, who had been her guardian since she was 9.

“I was afraid of talking about it (grief) because I was afraid people would not listen to you express yourself. You are only allowed to grieve during the burial; after that, you can almost feel the society telling you that you are not the first to lose a parent so you should get over it,” she says.

One of the drawings titled ‘Anger’ depicts a human character, high-contrast against a bright beige background, boiling in rage with a bright-red flame-like representation of its hair.

In another, titled ‘A Million Masks’, four similarly dark human characters against the same bright background, are enjoined at the torso, but each has a different theatrical mask.

And of another depicting a lone character in an upside-down theatrical mask with a long shadow behind it, she says, “When you are as conserved as I am, you don’t really want to show the pain, so I was really desperate to hide it. I couldn’t even open up to my best friend because I didn’t think she cared enough. I wanted to hide in a room and cry myself to sleep.”

Give hope

So why did she choose to share the deeply personal works with the world? It was to break, she says, the tension around people expressing their sad emotions in most African societies.

“I talk about my grief so that next time anybody has someone around them who is grieving, they can understand where someone is coming from and also begin the conversation on it being okay to grieve,” Mumbi says.

She ends up striking conversations with complete strangers with whom her work resonates. Some have called it brave that she chose to put herself in her vulnerable state out there.

“One of the people who saw the work wrote to me and said, ‘I’m happy that you are talking about this because I am not able to come out and talk about this’,” she says, “People tell me ‘Now I understand where people in grief are coming from’.”

If you told her in March 2020 that she would be among the artists whose work would be featured in a group exhibition in Italy last year, Mumbi would not have believed you.

She would not have believed you, either, if you told her that in March this year, her work would be sitting on the walls of Mzima House along Nairobi’s Riverside Drive, attracting curious visitors asking about the stories behind her drawings.

All this was in the future.

And now, asked what she seeks to achieve with her work, Mumbi says, “I want my art to open up conversations about the subjects I am talking about in the pieces, and through that hopefully create safe spaces for people and give hope.”

(This publication was produced with the financial support of the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of Dennis Musau and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.)