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Blessed is the Spectrum

When creating this work, I wanted to ask, "What makes a respectable Ugandan woman? Who gets to decide what behavior is considered appropriate ? Do these behaviors and actions dictate how much you belong to your culture or on the periphery?" The Gomesi is a traditional attire in Uganda, said to command respect; they are often bright and decorative and worn to social and customary gatherings. Through this work I aim to speak on my individual experience of being as a Ugandan woman and how it's intertwined with the greater reality of how the more liberated and free-thinking a Ugandan woman becomes, the harder it becomes for their culture to accept them.  This art piece asserts the right for women of all ideological leanings to exist in their traditional cultural spaces by portraying women in traditional clothing doing (in)appropriate things.

Diptych

During the COVID pandemic, I lived through two extensive nationwide lockdowns in Uganda. In spite of the limited mobility it brought, I still wanted to experiment with some creative ideas. This led to combining  the tactile and digital aspects of my art still, using a technique called tchin tchin bari (sand painting)  . I created  textural pieces with charcoal dust. These pieces were then  scanned and combined with hand drawn illustrations  in Adobe Photoshop. The images produced bore similarities to Rorschach inkblots used in psychoanalysis. They also reflect the contrasting emotional states I experienced during this very challenging time for myself and the world in general. The dissolution of my own lived reality and paradigm shift in my understanding of the world are central to this work.

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