FINDING A SOFTNESS
Dec 2024 - Solo Exhibition (The Space)
This self-curated solo exhibition was presented at The Space, Agora Village, Lusaka, and brought together a new body of work developed over a twelve-month period. The collection marked a shift toward greater lightness and openness, with a palette of soft pinks, greys, lilacs, and greens disrupted by heavier blocks of colour and vigorous mark-making. The works move in a constant push and pull — between softness and abrasion, beauty and imperfection, order and unrest.
At its core lies an interest in duality — soft and hard, dark and light, ordered and chaotic, lost and found. Imperfection is not concealed but made visible, creating space for discomfort and the possibility of something deeper emerging.
Working across canvas, paper, and central site-specific installations, the exhibition explored duality as a means of extracting meaning. Drawing from journal writings, I translated personal reflections into etched text, soldered surfaces, stitched fragments, and symbolic discarded objects. Language became embedded in material — subtle yet insistent.
The works were shaped in response to socio-political tensions, particularly the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and considers cultural landscapes marked by division and inherited narratives. This outward gaze led inward, toward childhood memory, loss and familial relationships.
The central installations, House of Cards and Stories On My Chest, disrupted the gallery space — confronting value and disposability, visibility and denial. The exhibition was both intimate and uneasy, inviting viewers to sit with paradox, vulnerability, and the courage of confronting what unsettles us.
(PDF catalogue available)
RAW PORTRAYALS
Nov 2023 - Solo Exhibition (37D Gallery)
This body of work emerged from a primal, emotive response to raw feeling, memory, and shared human experience. The palette became the conceptual starting point: earth tones and organic forms dominate, alongside materials with “raw edges” that speak to natural states — tenderness and pain, fragility and resilience, life and death.
The mixed media paintings carry abstracted narratives built through layers of drawing, painting, etching, texture, colour fields, transfer photography, and signature mark-making. Vulnerable figurative elements surface intermittently, exploring the subconscious, childhood memory, and womanhood — gestures intended to evoke emotions that transcend time, class, and demography.
Titles function as quiet thresholds, creating a gateway between aesthetic, material, and language — allowing meaning to move between what is seen, felt, and read.
The recurring motif of the vessel appears in painted calabash forms and a carved wooden pedestal — metaphors for the woman as carrier, with the plinth as counterpart. This symbolism extends into drawings on paper, etched cork works, and a series of still-life paintings where botanical line and natural marks intertwine.
A suspended, layered tapestry installation — earth-stained canvas, torn textiles, text, and photographic fragments — introduces transparency, division, and connection. Rusted metal, wood, cork, and organic materials expand the conversation, creating an immersive environment where inner and outer worlds meet: tender, raw, and unapologetic.
(PDF catalogue available)
INTERPLAY
Nov 2022 - Solo Exhibition (The Studio)
Interplay brought together a body of work created over a period of reflection, travel, and time spent at home — a time in which I had been quietly collecting. These collected objects — pieces of wood, stones, dried grasses, fragments of paper or metal — were my “treasures,” kept for the surprise of their aesthetic beauty or for the way they hinted at something deeper, human, and non-literal. This act of collecting was both physical and conceptual: saving found objects, while also gathering thoughts and ideas that marinated until they demanded creative exploration.
Photographic compositions, often abstracted close-ups captured with my iPhone, served as another form of collecting. Everyday moments — the play of light on a concrete wall, a falling shadow, the edge of water, or the shapes formed by containers — were transformed into tools for creative expression. As Robert Rauschenberg wrote, “The camera is the transport for my eye and carries my seeing from place to place.” These images abstracted reality, making the ordinary extraordinary and revealing the interconnectedness of fragile and robust, man-made and natural, lost and found.
Building on my last solo exhibition also held in my studio in 2019, Interplay incorporated long-standing processes — painting, paper and textile collage, handwritten text, poetry, photographic imagery — alongside new experimental approaches. Layering remained central to the work, both in the artworks themselves and in the way the exhibition occupied the studio space and needed to be navigated. Pieces were experienced interactively, tangible yet transient, with glimpses of the unfinished offering “windows of possibility” and evoking a constant state of change.
The exhibition flow mirrored the fluidity of creation, juxtaposed against the solidity of the concrete structures built to act as obstructions and disruptions of space. Viewers moved through the studio, adjusting their footing and noticing layers within layers — in the paintings, photographic compositions, and environment — discovering intersections, connections, and moments of resonance.
The exhibition included a projected reel of images accompanied by a live piano performance, creating an immersive sensory experience. This interplay of sound and moving image conversed with the paintings, photographs, and installations, extending the layered, interactive nature of the exhibition and inviting viewers to experience the works in the place where they were made, transforming it into a multidimensional, temporal space.
Everything was in flow. Nothing was static. To be alive was to shift, to move, and to find new meaning in both the seen and the unseen.
(PDF catalogue available)
LAYERS ON TIME
May 2019 - Solo Exhibition (The Studio)
Art, for me, is a way of being — an instinctive response to the world. Its impulse lies in capturing the abstract through expression, thought, and process. Through making, I attempt to articulate visually and conceptually what exists beyond surface judgement — beyond what is simply pleasing or displeasing to the eye. Art sharpens my perception; it allows me to see more vividly and to understand the world I inhabit with greater depth.
This exhibition brings together several interconnected bodies of work, interplaying themes of transition, time, and the evolving nature of identity.
The figurative paintings and mixed media works loosely examine the role of the woman across shifting social parameters — observing endurance, change, and adaptation. This inquiry is deeply personal. As a mother of four — and particularly of two daughters navigating their own transitions — I reflect on parallel shifts within myself: the layered versions of identity that exist within womanhood and motherhood, the expectations placed upon us, and the ongoing negotiation between social roles and self-acceptance.
Process is central throughout the exhibition. In the large abstract paintings Influence and Consequence, digital prints of my own photographs of empty metal billboards — their advertisements peeled away, rusted surfaces exposed — are recontextualised. Once vehicles of instruction and consumption, these structures become abstract fields void of directive. What remains is surface shaped by erosion and time. The absence of message becomes the message. These works question how we are influenced, and how meaning shifts through decay, transition, and transformation.
In this exhibition I also present, for the first time, painted calabash forms — the vessel as canvas. The calabash becomes metaphor for the female body: a carrier, a container, both fragile and resilient.
The collaged works build textured surfaces through drawing, mark-making, and cut fragments that are obscured, revealed, or buried. Layers On Time and New Narrative speak directly to this conceptual thread. Just because something cannot be seen does not mean it does not exist.
Across the collections, materials, images, and forms shaped by time are reassembled and reframed — evoking a quiet visual poetry of memory, erosion, individuality and the human condition.
SCATTERED BELONGINGS
March 2017 - Solo Exhibition (37D Gallery)
This collection unfolds in segments, echoing the construction of roadside shelters (Ntembas) and the way goods and clothing are grouped and bundled. Processes of layering, stitching, covering, discarding, retrieving, and recycling underpin both the materials and the concept.
In the larger canvas works, transferred photography images, text, gestural drawing, lines and spontaneous mark making can be seen on top painted or layered backgrounds. Hand drawn text and collaged drawn and painted elements result in ‘chaotic’ compositions that invite the viewer to explore the paintings from their edges rather than from the center out.
As a child I remembers the anticipation of sorting through piles of secondhand clothes in hopes of finding something to cherish and give a second life to. On school holidays visits to ‘The Market’ to buy clothes was something my sisters and I would look forward to and where the majority of our wardrobe came from. My interest in finding value in something used and discarded has probably stemmed from that time as is my appreciation of surface textures that appear to have been eroded by time and natural elements.
‘Deconstructed Ntemba’ was a hanging installation comprising of 88 wood blocks that have been covered/clad in materials commonly used to make the city stalls, shelters, Ntembo’s. Black plastic, sacking cloth, cardboard, rusted roofing sheets, wood, bottle tops as washes etc, creating an immersive space that is unexpectedly beautiful despite its origins of necessity.
The second installation was titled ‘Bundles’ which comprised of a few hundred individually hand stitched balls, ‘bundles’ strung together and suspended from the ceiling in divided into to groups which gather on plinths and then down into piles on the floor. This piece represents the second hand clothing market and uses completely recycled textiles and plastics.
I worked with a small group of farm worker ladies to stitch the balls. Connecting with the women through this helped me visualize and link ideas of individuality and the interconnection of people from different groups of society. Found waste material as well as personal discarded clothes and textiles were used, which added the human bodily aspect and reflected the interconnectedness of people and labor.
Scattered Belongings interrogates waste, recycling, sustainability of livelihoods and the woman’s role asking how value, identity, and sustainability are negotiated across social hierarchies.
