Exploring memory, spirituality, and human connection with the earth through multi-media works spanning textiles, glass, ceramics, and installation.
Agnes Waruguru, Marmalade Skies (Pelagia), 2024. Natural pigment, acrylic paint, acrylic ink on watercolour paper, 150.2 x 180.7cm. Courtesy of the artist and Circle Art Gallery.
Waruguru’s second solo presentation at Circle brings together a series of works created over the past two years alongside new works from 2024 spanning textile, drawing, printmaking, ceramics, glass, needlework, natural pigment making and installation. Waruguru’s work is often connected to their lived experience in the world, reflecting on human interaction with the earth and connecting this with the inner self. It touches on themes of time, traditional cultural practices, memory, invented memory, grief, spirituality, and elemental sensibilities. Many works use water as a primary medium or tool for making, thinking of water as an archive, an active messenger and a maker. Additionally, through repetitive gestures, the installations and multi-media works act as reminders and cleansing, held with care and slowness—a space for listening and waiting.
‘What the Water Left Behind’, Agnes Waruguru’s second solo presentation at Circle, brings together a series of works created over the past two years alongside new works from 2024. Waruguru’s approach is an assemblage of fragments that, when read together, mould an immersive space that is at once restful, hopeful, and contemplative. Her works span textiles, drawing, printmaking, ceramics, glass, needlework, natural pigment-making, and installation.
The exhibition is named after a series of glassworks Waruguru made during their residency at Rijksakademie. These works evoke multiple allusions to water, with glass resembling water and sharing similar physical properties in ‘What the Water Left Behind,’ Waruguru channels water as an active messenger, maker, and healer while allowing the creation of water as an archive. The large-scale installations and other works serve as instruments for memory, cleansing, and meditation, and each accompanying action is considered slowly and carefully.
In making textiles and paper works, the emergent gesture is a controlled pouring of salt and water on the surface as a primer to receive natural pigments, acrylic paints, inks, and watercolours. What follows is a push and pull in which layers of gentle washes and more concentrated beads of pigment pool blend and accumulate to create illusory landscapes, vast and open. When experienced at scale, the monumental installations surround the viewer and bring about a bodily effect that can alter mood and mental states, activating a slowdown and a space for listening and waiting.
Waruguru’s work is often connected to their lived experience, reflecting on human interaction with the earth and relating this to their inner self. Expanding on themes that continue to be of interest to them, such as time, traditional cultural practices, memory, grief, spirituality, and elemental sensibilities, they remain attuned and sensitive to their environment and, through these interactions, conjure new dreamscapes for us all to inhabit.
Waruguru received a BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, USA. She has participated in residencies in Kenya, at the Saba Artists Residency in Lamu, Artspace in Sydney, Australia and in 2023, completed a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Waruguru participated in the inaugural edition of the Stellenbosch Triennale, South Africa, in 2020 and had her first solo show ‘Small Things to Consider’ at Circle Art Gallery later that same year. In 2022, she was nominated for the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prize, and in 2024, for the Norval Sovereign African Art Prize.
Recent exhibitions and Biennale invitations include: ‘Echoes of Our Stories’ at Quinta do Quetzal, 2023; 22nd Biennial Sesc–Videobrasil in Sao Paulo, 2023; ‘Woven Sanctuaries’, Rele Gallery, Los Angeles and ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ at the main exhibition at the Arsenale, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2024. Most recently, Waruguru was featured in The Artsy Vanguard—Young Artists to Watch list, an annual feature highlighting the most promising artists working today.
The exhibition will be on view from the 20th of November, 2024, until the 3rd of January, 2025. For more information, please visit Circle Art Gallery.
