Agnes Waruguru Njoroge

Agnes Waruguru (b. 1994 Nairobi, Kenya) lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya.

Waruguru is interested in everyday materials, especially those associated with the home. Many of her works reference women’s practices and traditional cultural identifiers. Her explorations are intimately rooted in personal identity politics, she integrates personal items with items she believes speak about her cultural identity. Her cultural identity combines strong attachments to the country of her birth and her adopted home, a hybrid identity. She layers found materials with objects she’s had around her

home to make wall hangings.

Her practice is a weaving of slow meditative processes and quick reactive moments, it is at once formal and abstract yet draws on everyday processes and crafts. She may spend a week threading beads or embroidering fabric, train rides crocheting or morning making a quick gestural painting. Waruguru will layer all of these processes to make a large-scale collage, a wall hanging. Waruguru is deeply invested in the process of making artwork, her practice embraces experimentation and is cross-disciplinary. She does work ranging from painting, drawing, printmaking, needlework, and installation. Although her works are mostly abstract they are often a mix of memory and

place.

Her work has been exhibited in group shows internationally including galleries in France, Kenya and Savannah and Valencia in the US. Waruguru received a B.F.A. in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA, in 2017. She earned a Diploma from the United World College of Southern Africa, Mbabane, Swaziland in 2013.

This is an installation born from a process of collecting and passing. It is about the passing down of

knowledge from one generation to the next through the retelling, and reenacting of certain traditions. The artist is interested in how gathering, creating, and re-contextualising certain specific objects and gestures can be a means of learning and remembering.