With my Mother’s Itch : SHAPEin’ AfroWomanist Artivism

Chelenge Van Rampleberg’s ‘Long Way Home’ and Poems by Luceille Clifton

Chalenge Van Rampleberg is a beloved contemporary Kenyan visual artist celebrated for her sculpting, printmaking and painting. On November 2nd, 2023 the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute opened its doors to exhibit her exceptional body of work in the solo exhibit titled, ‘The Long Way Home’. For the very first time, Chelenge exhibited artworks inclusive of her nearly four decade-long career.
Chelenge blends enigmatic and familiar shapes in her sculptures which illuminate interwoven expressions of motherhood, ecological connection, and Africanity, to actively engage viewers in deep inspection of collectivity, and engage critique of white-capitalist-patriarchy. Her wood sculptures in “Long Way Home” reference these recurring themes and in doing so, join in conversation with AfroWomanist Artivism that advocates for equity, audacious love and ecoharmony from the perspectives of women of the African Diaspora.

In her book, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Alice Walker, coined womanism as being “to feminist as purple is to lavender”; a womanist is “a black feminist or feminist of color, with outrageous, audacious, courageous, and willful behavior…committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female”, who “loves music. Loves dance. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk” [1]. Along this vein, shape, line, texture, light and shadow are visual languages in Chelenge’s sculptures that engage with the poems of Lucille Clifton on matters of motherhood, womanhood, justice, environment, and memory.

[1] Alice Walker, “Dear Reader,” In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. (San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 10.

*i am accused of tending to the past* Lucille Clifton i am accused of tending to the past
as if I made it, as if i sculpted it with my own hands. i did not. this past was waiting for me when I came, a monstrous unnamed baby, and i with my mother’s itch took it to breast and named it History.
she is more human now, learning language everyday, remembering faces, names and dates. when she is strong enough to travel. on her own, beware, she will.

from her collection, *Quilting: Poems 1987-1990*

The sculpture above is titled, My Mum and I (Mama Yangu na Mimi), from 1985, and is made of Avocado (Mparachichi) wood from Van Rampleberg’s family lands. The mother’s itch described by womanist poet and mother, Lucille Clifton, is imprinted, wrinkled, scratched and nicked into the surface of the light avocado wood. In Chelenge’s sculpture, the mothers upward gaze and open mouth convey a feeling of love-led burden, the weight and responsibility of devoted love between mother and cild. She sculpts a child cradled snugly against its mothers chest to breastfeed, carving one branch into two joined bodies. Shape and line offer the nursing child like a new sprout from its mothers chest, modeling the miracle of two bodies becoming one. The child’s hand presses deep into the mothers side creating wrinkle lines, Chelenge’s use of shape and line suggest that mother and child impact each other, that the memories we hold leave traces on us, and that history confronts us with ourselves.

*homage to my hips.* Lucielle Clifton these hips are big hips. they need space to move around in. they don’t fit into little petty places. these hips are free hips. they don’t like to be held back. these hips have never been enslaved, they go where they want to go they do what they want to do. these hips are mighty hips. these hips are magic hips. I have known them to put a spell on a man and spin him like a top!

Black Beauty (Mrembo Mweusi), 2004, Sikitoi

The Jacaranda wood sculpture, *Elephant Woman*,
made
by Chelenge in 2004, is a figure where light
and
shadow
direct viewers to consider the intertwined
postures of
ecological justice and AfroWomanism.
On one side, light
hits the shapes of a breast and a large elephant trunk; on the other
side, shadow conceals a large eye which, in its shelter,
sees viewers before we see it. While the eye subverts the
passive spectator, the proportions and protrusion of both
trunk and breast become phallic objects that castrate the
poaching gaze of white-capitalist-patriarchy. Carved hips
are balanced opposite to the trunk, and the leading lines of
the etched braids create visual harmony and asymmetrical
balance in the sculpture. As the line of vision moves from
top to bottom, *Elephant Woman* stands as an *Art*ivist
exclamation of AfroEcoWomanism to forefront the
perspectives of African women in critically and creatively
confronting empirical capitalist regimes for their
exploitations of both women and the environment.

The Man I and The Man II, pictured below, are two of Chelenge’s earliest sculptures made in 1992. Hewn from the branch of an Avocado Tree (Mparachichi), she (re)arranges physical features on faces to complicate viewers’ perception of familiar and expected facial patterns. Her use of shape to perplex passive viewing is a clever exercise to for viewers to engage in the conceptual work of visual arts to think critically about the assumptions which follow perception, and about representations of race as constitutive.

Chelenge shared remarkable artworks from the full span of her career in woodcut print, painting, and sculpture. I chose to focus on the later in my writing because her conduction of light, shadow, texture and line as a visual language both challenged and deeply inspired my viewing of sculptures and my formal analysis.

MORE WORKS FROM CHELENGE’S ‘LONG WAY HOME’