Kibo Lane Art Fair: Artists come into open air after long hibernation

Gabriela Gakuo’s Daisy Heaven painting. PHOTO | POOL

The Kibo Lane Art Fair, held last weekend in Nairobi’s Karen, was the venue where three working artists came out into the open air after hibernating quietly for far too long.

Geraldine Robarts, Gabriela Gakuo, and Gakunju Kaigwa may not look like they have much in common. After all, Geraldine is very much of a solo creative, working round the clock on her ever-experimental paintings. Meanwhile Gabby is more of an ‘emerging’ artist who only now, after many years working for an international airline, is coming back to her original training, which was in art and design. And Gakunju is a professional sculptor whose art has been shown all over the world, yet he too had gotten lost in his teaching and dedication to his students, such that he’s now reemerging after some time.

Fortunately, it was Geraldine who called the other two to join her for the art fair. She held a bit of sway since she had been both of their Kenyatta University lecturer in fine art.

“I had taught them both, and I had hoped to exhibit with them at some point,” Geraldine told BDLife at the opening of the art fair last Friday afternoon.

She had even built a spacious, well-lit exhibition hall behind her home in hopes that other artists would come and exhibit there. But she never advertised that space since she’s been using it ever since to exhibit her own recent works of art.

For instance, as she is a believer in recycling and upcycling found objects, Geraldine had found a lot of rusty mabati (iron sheet), which she had once used on the roof of her studio.

“I wanted to elevate the ceiling in my studio, so I decided to use the left-over mabati to create my latest paintings,” she said.

For instance, her autobiographical piece entitled My Family featured mabati cut-outs of her sister, mother and herself, all three of which were painted and then stapled onto stretched canvas.

Gabriela Gakuo’s Garden painting. PHOTO | POOL

Her granny is also in the painting but painted directly onto the canvas, symbolic of the behind-the-scenes role her fashion-designer grandmother had played in her life.

Her studio next door also displayed a half dozen of Gakunju’s functional artworks. These were shapely wooden seats and tables made from an array of local woods, either eucalyptus or podo, grevillea or jacaranda, and then finely polished with resin.

Reassuring me that he hadn’t chopped down a single tree to create his wooden furniture, Gakunju said he’d found most of his giant tree stumps at building sites where the wood might otherwise have been used for firewood if he hadn’t picked it in time.

Years ago, Gakunju told me he’d always wanted to teach, so when the opportunity arose, he happily went to teach ISK students. But it frankly curtailed his sculptural work, which he is just getting back to. Having worked in all manner of media, he’s created sculptures in everything from Carara marble and Kisii stone to bronze, clay, and fibreglass to welded steel, local building blocks, and Jacaranda wood.

Gabriela Gakuo’s Indigenous wood sculpture painting. PHOTO | POOL

So one hopes the Kibo Lane Art Fair will re-activate Gakunju’s dedication to pursuing his art since he’s among our very finest sculptors in the land.

And Gabby Gakuo is another fine artist who responded to Geraldine’s suggestion to help create a troika of artists exhibiting at the art fair.

Having gotten drawn into administrative work soon after she completed her course at KU, Gabby is also just getting back to remembering she is an artist who need not apologise for it.

The simplicity of her work is charming, but the ones that I feel are most effective are not on canvas, but rather on plywood where she paints trays in both abstract and picturesque images and on the sort of sufuria (metal cooking pan) that are normally called a ‘wok’.

“Builders were working across the street from me who I saw shovelling cement and sand using that [work], so I asked them to get me a few,” Gabby told BDLife.

Gakunju Kaigwa at Kibo Lane Art Fair in Karen, Nairobi on October 20, 2023. PHOTO | POOL

“When they brought them back to me, I realised what fun it would be to paint on them, rather than on canvas,” she said, speaking now like a good student of Geraldine who also loved looking for new materials to create with.

Gabby’s paintings were all displayed outdoors on easels while the rest of Gakunju’s sculptures were graciously placed all over Geraldine’s home, a home in which every wall is filled with brightly coloured paintings by the mwalimu herself.

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