It was a billboard on Nairobi's Limuru Road just after the UN turnoff and before Village Market that told us that there was an exhibition of Chelenge’s art further down the road at the Rosslyn Riviera Mall.
Chelenge Van Rampelberg, to give her full name, is an old friend. She is not old, but the friendship is. So we went.
The exhibition is in the gallery of NCAI, the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute. We were surprised by the scale of Chelenge’s work: the number and variety of her sculptures, woodcuts and paintings.
The sculptures, particularly, are beautiful – in their textures and their lines. And the stories they tell are intriguing, provocative and, sometimes, disturbing.
To hear more about their stories, we rang Chelenge and arranged to meet her at the gallery a few days later.
The exhibition is called, ‘The Long Way Home’. My first question, when we met, was, ‘Where is home?’ ‘It is here,’ she said. ‘It is now. I feel at home.’
To reach this feeling, she has gone a long way back: to the place where she grew up, and even to the Garden of Eden. It has been a long journey, and the coming has not been without personal and professional difficulties to surmount.
I challenged Chelenge when she said that she had had no training for her work. True, she has been to no formal school of art. But, according to what I have read, as a very young child, she joined her father in his weekend hobby of making traditional three-legged stools.
From him, she learnt how to use homemade chisels, saws, hammers and sharpened nails. But when her father said that she ought to have been born a boy, she was hurt.
Many of her sculptures are about what it means to be a woman. In ‘Black Beauty’, for example, she has carved as Okot p’Bitek wrote in ‘Song of Lawino ’. Remember when Lawino sings the praises of the traditional dance:
‘It is danced in broad daylight,
Her eyes sparkle like the fireflies,
But Chelenge also has sculptures that show the pain of giving birth and the weight of children women carry after giving birth. ‘And I quarrel with God,’ she said.
She remembers the time she went to church as a child – how Christ on the cross was white and the men surrounding him with spears were black. She didn’t go to church again. A few of her sculptures are of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. ‘Why is it always Eve who is to blame for giving Adam the forbidden fruit?’
It was wonderful to hear her explain the therapeutic process of bringing her sculptures to life. She talked of the initial efforts of wielding the chisel – blow after blow. She talked about the finishing strokes of the sandpaper.
I asked if it was often difficult to finish a piece. ‘Always!’ she said. It sounded like a mother explaining how difficult it is to let her child go.
She talks with her sculptures as she is shaping them. She admitted it is often difficult to let them be sold. For this exhibition at the NCAI, most of the sculptures have been lent by individual owners, hotels and other places where they are displayed. A few have even been shipped back from Japan.
Chelenge told us that before the launch she was alone in the gallery with all her sculptures. I can imagine the kind of conversation she had with them.
The exhibition is on at the Rosslyn Riviera Mall till February 17. I hope that some of you will go. If you do, your journey will be much shorter than the journey home Chelenge will be telling you through her work.
