Agnes Waruguru

KE, 1994

resident
- 2021 – 2023

Waruguru is interested in everyday materials, especially those associated with the home and everyday life. 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 homes, a hybrid identity. She layers found materials and images 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 a 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 artworks, he practice embraces experimentation and is cross-disciplinary. She makes 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, 2017. She is currently in residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.