Wandulu Timothy
2023
Born in Uganda, Rwandan by nationality. I am a multi-disciplinary contemporary artist running a creative arts studio in Kigali, Rwanda. My arts practice ranges from visual arts in mixed media painting to sculpting with interest in architecture and design, performance and installation art.
With experience gained from participating in local and international arts projects and workshops, artist residencies and exhibitions, cultural exchanges and educational programs on leadership facilitation. These influence my role and growth as an artist.
The narrative I tell with my art is that it is really meant to act as a conductor to connect people to see themselves in the art I make. I want people to experience my work and reflect on what I represent as their own experiences reflected back to them. The content of the work is very important as it embodies reflections of personal experiences too and I believe they are not distant from a collective human experience.
In my practice, I experiment quite a lot with materials which has facilitated my growth greatly. I use photographic materials, typography, written texts and language developing artworks on canvas and paper to document and highlight social narratives and experiences, aspirations and dreams of those I engage with and portray in my work.
I am an artist using human stories to deconstruct and reconstruct social narratives therefore my art acting as a voice and tool for awareness. In my practice, the human connection comes first then the work develops from there. In the beginning I started with myself reflecting on how I represent myself tackling the idea of identity. As I developed my working process, I started to realize that the relationship between the story of the character, the material and final developed work were as important as the character themselves.
And that is what my work is really. It is a complex mixture of emotions and reflections to the relationships I develop and how they impact me as an artist. I really want the people portrayed in my work to exist as representations of great resilience, and for the work to be seen as a new perspective that one can use to look back on their everyday life.
I would say the most important influence is human stories. That is where I draw my inspiration to do the work I do. I am really attracted to photo albums and the human stories they hold. When I was young, there was a flood that destroyed almost all our family photos. I probably only have one personal childhood photo and a few with my siblings and family.
As I grew older, I started to reflect on my upbringing, memory and related that to the work I was making of self-portraits on identity and cross border mobility. I didn’t have much photographic material to work with, this led me to start collecting abandoned photographs, old photo albums, and photographing what I experience in my immediate environment as a way of digitally sketching.
These in return are the material I use to develop my work around identity, human mobility, mental health, education, among many other social issues and memory. The presence of my body in my work has always been a conscious decision really. It started with my work on identity. Looking back on it, I had no other way to express what I was going through. Unpicking on very personal experiences and relationships with expectations I had to be socialized with. I had to realize, find, want to dis-embody and embody some ideal image.
With art, I was able to show and voice what I am about as an artist and as a growing individual in my society, be vocal as the idea of identity transcends many boundaries globally and I still do that with my art. “The personal is universal” really, that is the cornerstone of my artistic practice. I investigate personal relationships that I have with people, environments and different social narratives abstracting them through layering of representational photographic materials and texts to drive a desired story and making them things and scenes everybody can identify with because we all have interconnected human experiences with social narratives.
