Untitled
Through the gestures of painting, drawing and printmaking, Louise Mandumbwa’s practice grasps at the notion of home from her perspective as the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants from Zambia, Angola and the Congo and an immigrant herself in the US.
By engaging collective memory, personal history and what is made possible when recognizable images and language begin to fall away, Louise’s practice presents the anecdote and fragmented recollection with the materials commonly used to construct the homes in Southern Africa. Rendering works in graphite, charcoal, paint and ink alongside concrete, wood, cast metal and glass, Mandumbwa navigates a translation of a context and place and through her work produces an iteration of a place that is not here. Translating memories into material, matrices into mono-prints and affect into image, Louise draws from transcribed conversations, familial archives and her own recollections of the vibrant, changing cities she’s called home. Subsequently her practice generates a constellation of meaning that holds space not only for the ephemeral and the constant, but also for the kind of presence and absence of what a translation can convey and what is lost in the process.
By engaging collective memory, personal history and what is made possible when recognizable images and language begin to fall away, Louise’s practice presents the anecdote and fragmented recollection with the materials commonly used to construct the homes in Southern Africa. Rendering works in graphite, charcoal, paint and ink alongside concrete, wood, cast metal and glass, Mandumbwa navigates a translation of a context and place and through her work produces an iteration of a place that is not here. Translating memories into material, matrices into mono-prints and affect into image, Louise draws from transcribed conversations, familial archives and her own recollections of the vibrant, changing cities she’s called home. Subsequently her practice generates a constellation of meaning that holds space not only for the ephemeral and the constant, but also for the kind of presence and absence of what a translation can convey and what is lost in the process.