A Wild Infection of The Wildly Shaken Public Mind

An attempt to describe the human self informs the recent work of Beatrice Wanjiku. Through drawing and painting she continues to explore our internal identities and territories. For her, the internal self is the centre of our intuitions, emotions and beliefs; the place where the inner person is first found, then prised out and delineated. The vehicle that carries her to her discoveries is the human figure — primarily the head and the torso — and by demarcating her findings the artist has succeeded in revealing some of the intricacies that define the bond between self and the physical body. 

From our many conversations, I believe Beatrice’s work draws from a deep well of personal realities and truths. As a result it radiates a warmth of possibly subliminal recognition that nonetheless can be disconcerting, because of its unembellished gaze. For the honesty that hallmarks her unflinching study suggests that her paintings and drawings far from being detached from the prevailing realities of a greater society are instead a facet of it. Her work therefore resonates beyond her own truthful insight to connect with the experiences of others; an experience that is intrinsic to most great creative expressions. This resonance is evident through the rawness and depths experienced when viewing her paintings. At times looking at Beatrice’s paintings and drawings becomes disquieting as they force one to look inwards

Untitled IV (2020)🔴

In a previous text I have touched on how her skillful use of paint and brush becomes a celebration of both craft and medium and here ‘A wild infection of the wildly shaken public’ offers a resolution both of her formal skills and her creative interpretation of her findings. This exhibition is of paintings and drawings that Beatrice has created over the last two years. The timeline is significant. In late 2019 the emergence of the Covid-19 virus and the resultant pandemic has reshaped and continues to alter most of social structures. Public health protocols of social distancing, masking, curfews, quarantines and lockdowns have been some of the measures introduced to combat this catastrophe to produce a new reality that is affecting not only our cultural development but also the ways in which we express and maintain our personal selfhood.

In ‘A a wild infection of the wildly shaken public mind’ the artist’s frame of reference is that isolation can become a setting that enables us to face up to circumstances beyond our control. In some of the work the forms appear volatile, lacking definition. They are dark and allude to an atmosphere seemingly striving to envelope and obscure our humanity and confound the existence of our inner selves.The subjects struggle to emerge or remerge into clarity. Yet while through these works, Beatrice grants the uncertainty embedded in the present, she also evokes our inherent potency and capacity for regeneration and new beginnings. 

© Kamwathi 2021