(water running)
I soak all the wood. I actually clean it all.
Just so it's as smooth
and usable as possible, you know?
It's got a little baby slug in it, see?
I think I've always been a city girl with a nature brain.
I've always loved animals, and plants, and insects.
[Wangechi Mutu: Between the Earth and the Sky]
(light violin music)
Nature has entered my work,
where I've been able to integrate
my love and interest for how little organisms behave
into these larger themes.
I want to make work that sits within nature,
sits under the sky, and the sun, and the rain, and the wind.
--All cleaned up.
(violin music continues)
[Wangechi Mutu Studio, Nairobi, Kenya]
(clanking)
(mechanical whirring)
(clanking)
I have a bird on top of the head of this sentinel.
--Yeah.
(man murmurs inaudibly)
--I've put nails in,
--but then I had to tape it because actually
--some of them are pretty short.
--I'm wondering if you can epoxy these in,
--and then what I'll do is I'll fill in.
--This is actually fine.
(mechanical whirring, drill like sound)
I'm generally a multitasking being.
That's how I've always done things.
There's always been a little bit of this,
a little bit of that, a little bit of this,
everywhere there's something going on.
(light piano music)
When I'm sculpting or when I'm painting,
there's always something that's damp.
So drying is a big part of the work.
I have to sort of time all of those things.
Sometimes a three-dimensional piece
will completely influence
how I end up working on a two-dimensional piece.
There's a lot of osmosis and learning from my work.
(tapping)
(light piano music continues)
(birds chirp)
My earliest childhood memories are in this one particular
area that we lived in called Woodley.
Lived in a little bungalow.
So you have one floor,
have a garden around.
I remember playing in the garden.
I remember the dry grass.
We did a lot of playing with our toys
in sections of the garden that we weren't supposed to.
We got very dirty in the garden.
It was a bit of a wild space.
Those memories have made an impact on how I work.
(birds chirping)
I went to a Catholic school, and we were all girls.
I was surrounded by women,
women teachers,
women students,
the Virgin Mary,
all kinds of feminine energy.
And because I think of it as such a massively universal
part of humanity,
I'm able to keep pulling from it.
It's an eternal source of inspiration for me.
(light violin music)
["The NewOnes, will free Us" (2019), The Metropolitan Museum of Art]
The way we worship the image of the woman
but denigrate the actual human being of woman,
that schism bothers me,
and it's obviously something that has plagued us
for a long, long time.
So that's what I'm looking for.
(violin music continues, and a harp plays too)
["Sentinels"]
The "Sentinels" are this regal figure,
who is standing,
representing a female
divine, feminine form.
I want to make sure that she is absolutely stable,
that she is able to stand.
I realized they look like these soldiers,
like they were guarding me, or us--
guarding language,
guarding the earth that they're made from.
So I call them "Sentinels."
Growing up in Kenya, during the seventies and eighties,
you're learning British geography, European history,
we had not touched on African literature.
We hadn't even looked at our own histories
and our own heritage and culture,
because a lot of Kenyans are so Christianized.
There isn't one particular way of seeing things.
And in fact,
when there is a singular voice or singular story,
it tends to be domineering,
problematic, and often fictional.
You know,
there's no way that can be one way to tell
the whole story.
I wanted to be able to say
"These are the places I come from,"
"these are the people we come from."
So I decided to apply to art school.
I had to aim for the moon,
so I applied to schools in New York.
(quick tempo music)
Collage, first and foremost, was the most accessible
and impactful way for me to work.
All the tools and supplies that I was afforded
by being in a big fancy university were gone.
I was deeply invested in becoming a serious artist,
but I didn't have the means,
so I started painting with watercolors.
Working with really, really wet and fluid materials,
there's always a surprise.
(quick tempo music continues)
But I also realized that there was this added tension
that I was looking for.
I would mix things from a wildlife magazine,
or some fashion magazine, or vintage illustration.
I would mix that with my watercolors,
and I loved the fact that I had grafted and brought them together,
and now you had to read it for what it was.
(piano music)
The collages developed and grew larger.
And I think at that point,
I was really thinking about the history of photography,
and how photography and colonization grew in impact
in a very similar way--
and how we photographed the "other."
The "other" was photographed, and packaged, and consumed.
Seeing yourself represented that way
impacted you as a colonized "other,"
and how your image essentially became who you were.
(violin music)
The currency that photography has afforded me
is extremely important.
I don't think it's something I've been able to articulate,
but it's always paintings that have photography
dancing behind them.
(violin music continues)
Combining humans and animals,
it's as old as the human mind.
(different strings music)
"Crocodylus" was this hybrid
between a woman and a powerful animal.
[Gladstone Gallery, New York City]
We've always admired certain creatures for their elegance
and their enormous strength.
One of the first things that we ever did
is look at some creature and go, "Oh my gosh,"
"I wish that had that speed, or that power,"
"or the stealth, or the courage."
(different string music continues)
"MamaRay" is a woman who is a veil,
an ocean herself,
a shield,
and a ray.
I was very interested in the marks
that draw us to look at something.
Texture produces shadow, and tone, and light, and rhythm,
and provokes us to look longer at something.
All my foundational teaching and work was in New York.
Once I began exhibiting, my base was there
so it made sense to be there.
But then for the longest time,
I wasn't able to travel back and forth
between Nairobi and New York.
And for those years,
I struggled with my perception of home.
(soft music)
I realized, "Okay,"
"this is the secret to a certain way"
"that I've been trying to work and think,"
which is to be able to compare
and look at myself
from one place
where this as a backdrop from the other,
with that as a backdrop,
and then combine that understanding.
(soft music continues)
(birds chirping)
(machine whirring)
The soil has become important for me in this Nairobi studio,
because I actually identify with the soil.
It's the soil that I remember from my childhood--
the color of the soil,
the feeling of the soil, the texture,
the way it behaves when it's dry, when it's wet,
when it rains.
In New York, I don't feel that same sense of identification
with the soil there.
I don't trust the soil;
I always think that there's other things going on
in the soil that I haven't put in
and weren't put in there in the first place by nature.
So there's this distance between me and the ground.
Whereas here, I tend to immediately want to capture
the essence of the soil, the malleability, the color,
the crispiness, the granular aspects.
All of those things are important for me in the work.
I truly believe that there's something about
taking these bits and pieces of trees and animals
and completely anonymous,
but extremely identifiable items,
and placing them somewhere that draws their energy.
Whatever they were coming from,
whatever they did,
whatever molten lava they came out of a million years ago,
that is now in my work.
And that little piece of energy is magnified.
(soft music continues)
I'm trying to just push up the volume on how incredibly
important every single plant and animal and human is
in keeping us all alive and afloat.
That's how I look at things when I'm in the studio.
When I feel like I'm really having fun and playing,
there's fear in it.
The suspicion of things being found,
all of that,
when that enters into the work,
that's when I'm in my absolute mode.
(music builds)