Louise Mandumbwa

Region: South

Website: http://louisemandumbwa.com

City / State: New Haven, CT

Through the gestures of painting, drawing, and printmaking, my practice grasps at the notion of home in the context of a diasporic experience.

Utilizing the material language of what would ordinarily be used to build a home in Southern Africa, my work employs the anecdote, the fragmented recollection, and a register of legibility. I am invested in a practice of close looking, exploring collective memory, and analyzing personal history; and in what is possible when the recognizable image or language begins to fall away.

My work parses through what’s activated in the gaps between what is knowable and the other kinds of knowing that emerge in conversation with the illegible image—the haptic and the failed translation. I am building out a constellation of meaning that holds space for the ephemeral and the constant, for both a presence and an absence.