The paintings develop quite slowly usually. I'll have an idea and sit with it for a
couple years maybe or a year unless there's something that happens that feels like it's
a bit more urgent and I feel a lot more committed to it and then I'll make a I'll follow it up much
quicker otherwise once I decide on an idea and it gains momentum I'll start making drawings.
I'll start doing some research into it. If there's a particular event that's happened I'll
research it. I'll look into different images and things that are on social media or I'll
look through my archives of drawings and see if there are images that I've been working with that
fit that idea and then from that, I'll start putting together different compositions through
the drawings and slowly figure out the size of the painting the different elements that I
want to contradict the story sometimes if that's necessary. The different historic art historical
references that fit and then ultimately there's the cloth. The cloth which will sometimes dictate
different parts of the composition so if there's a particularly textured or wrinkled part of the
cloth it can affect what goes in that particular part of the painting and then of course you have
colour and reference to to place and the subject will often push the colour in a particular way
or I will ask for the painting to be worked on more or less depending on what it needs. So as
most of or almost all of my paintings are based on subjects that are in East Africa
I spend quite a lot of time out there mainly to do drawing so a lot of the
drawings will be from life. They'll be from either people will sit to me or I'll spend a lot of time
travelling around the country particular places that I want to incorporate in the paintings or
particular landscapes. When I'm there I'll make drawings from life then I'll go back to the studio
in Nairobi where again I'll work on maybe more images that are based on things in social media or
popular culture. Either music videos or you know other images you can find on Twitter or
anything that helps really. Then I rarely paint at the moment I rarely paint when I'm in Kenya and it's just more gathering ideas and developing themes for up-and-coming shows and
new bodies work. Maybe I'll have a couple months out there to prepare stuff for a new body
of work and then I'll come back to London and spend my time when I'm in London mainly making
the paintings. It's an interesting setup because you do end up with a lot of distance from
the subject which changes my relationship with what I'm making and subsequently
sometimes I'll be kind of energized about a the particular aspect of the new body of work
that when I have a bit of distance it doesn't lose its interest. Other elements of
the work comes to the surface and become more important. So then once I'm in London I
spend most of my time in the studio just making the paintings. I'll work on several paintings at
once, again that's just a way of giving me time to digest the marks that I do make the
images that I make and how they all play off each other so often a decision in one painting will be
because of a decision in another as opposed to specify what that painting needed.
Which means that the paintings have a particular dynamic when they are together and that for me is
quite important how the paintings react off each other and the way the different images influence other
paintings. So the bark has really opened up my painting practice in the
sense that it's forced me to change how I paint to incorporate the surface into the
work which completely destabilizes everything that I did before. It's a pretty extraordinary material
in that, it's made from the bark of a lubugo tree and that process is several hundred years
old. The process starts by scraping the skin off the tree this then exposes what
will be the surface of the cloth, after that a shapen machete is used to score down
the outside of the bark only going in sort of a centimeter or two centimeters so it doesn't damage
the inner bark of the tree which would then kill the tree so it's very precise. Once they do that
they use the part of the stalk of a banana leaf tree of a banana tree to run up the scored line
and this slowly peels away the outer bark from the inner bark of the tree. The reason they use the
banana leaf and is that it doesn't cut into the second bark, this means that the BOC keeps
doing what it does and keeps the tree alive and it doesn't damage it in any way. Once they've scored
and peeled off the bark they'll very carefully look for any knots where the bark stuck onto the
inner bark and again slowly prise the bark off not to damage the tree itself. The whole of the
bark eventually comes off and they'll cut it on the top of it so it just comes off the tree.
After this the the guys who do this wipe their sweat along the whole of the BOK with a banana
leaf and then they wrap the tree with dried wet banana leaves so that it's protected from all
the elements and by the time that the leaves dry and fall off the bark wouldn't have regrown and it
would be strong enough to withstand wind, rain and sun without killing the tree. The bark itself is
then taken, laid flat on the ground with dried banana leaves were laid on top of it. They're lit so it
very lightly singes the top of the bark this then changes the colour so you end up with a two-tone
cloth. On the top it's a little bit darker and underneath it's kind of a paler sienna colour. The
bark is then washed and soaked and although any of the burnt bits of the bark are wiped
and rubbed off after this means that the bark is a little bit more flexible so
it's then taken to a little shed where the guys will sit and beat it with a mallet. That looks a
little bit like a meat tenderizer. this goes on for hours it takes probably about five or six hours of beating the bark
for it to then soften and become a cloth the cloth is then laid out in the Sun and dried. The drying is over in about two weeks once that's done the bark is ready. Usually
the bark would be used as a burial shroud and so the Buganda who are the main tribe in Uganda
and they're the ones that produce the bark will bury their dead in the cloth and they also would
use it for major ceremonies. They'll often wear it. I came across the cloth in a tourist
store and it was being used as a placemat and it was only after looking into how I could
find this that I came across this extraordinary process and that now is the basis for all of the
paintings. In my mind what it does is locate the work very specifically in that part of the
world and not only that it puts it within a longer historical context of cultural production and this
was incredibly important because ultimately they're paintings and paintings main history
and the one that I look at and talk of the most is a Western art history and it was important for me
to be able to locate both the history of the work and the current cultural references in East Africa.