LOUISE MANDUMBWA

ARTIST STATEMENT

My paintings celebrate the beauty and tenacity of everyday people- creating intimate snapshots through which ideas of individual identity, and the human condition are explored. I strive to humanize my subjects, people who all too often are represented as a sum of their tragedies and victims of circumstances. Having grown up in a developing nation, I often found myself in the company of resilient driven personalities, qualities that now inform the ways in which I present the subjects in my portraits.

 

I utilize the nature of my preferred surface to further facilitate the narrative nature of my work. The works rendered on wood panel were completed with sections of the wood grain exposed; I believe just as each resulting work contained and demonstrated specificity of culture and singular story, the wood grain varying from one piece to the next demonstrated the same. My more recent works exploring universal belong in the context of a foreigner are rendered on plexiglass removing any separation between the work and space it inhabits.Both technique and surface are intended deliver an emotive work in which one might recognize facets of themselves in- regardless of their background: an individual that dares hope