Abstract autobiographical tapestries colour the walls of a downtown gallery as Lynette Musukubili presents ‘Material Memories’.
Following ‘Bukalo Stories’ (2023), Musukubili’s solo debut, the exhibition shifts from the culture, memories and impressions of the artist’s childhood home to her life in the Namibian capital.
Painstakingly crocheted with gifted and sourced plastic, ‘Material Memories’ is currently on display at The Project Room at 5 Crohn Street in Windhoek.
Detailing Musukubili’s daily urban commute – from the local vendors who sell her tomatoes to the friend she met working as an artist and gallery assistant – Musukubili elevates the mundanity of the everyday into a vivid visual diary.
“‘Material Memories’ is more about documenting my life in the moment. It’s about navigating the city, trying to create something for myself and figuring out life,” Musukubili says.
“It’s also exploring the idea of memory. How memory lives within our bodies. How we move. How we do things. How we speak, and also how memories live in the materials that we use.”
In artworks such as ‘Mind Map, Navigating Windhoek’, ‘Peluka’ and ‘The Friend You Meet Along the Way’, the memories that live in the materials are of Musukubili’s nephew, traditional dance and of her fellow artist and friend Maria Mbereshu.
The first makes use of her nephew’s plastic diaper bags. These items, crocheted to make a yellow and orange border on one of Musukubili’s most striking pieces, recalls the sweetness of her nephew’s babyhood.
In ‘The Friend You Meet Along the Way’, Musukubili uses blue plastic from Bremen gifted to her by Mbereshu upon her return from her first residency in the German city.
The piece celebrates the friendship between the two women artists, as well as the milestones in their artistic careers.
“For ‘Navigating Windhoek’, I actually had to wait for my nephew to use his nappies. There’s also plastic from Choppies, which is where we do our monthly shopping. The darker blue is from Checkers,” Musukubili says.
“I try to incorporate the plastic we use in our home and I have some friends who will say: ‘Oh, Lynette! I have plastics for you’. When the plastic has specks of different colours running through it, it’s usually recycled. But when it’s really clean, that’s usually plastic that I have bought.”
In the curation cards that accompany Musukubili’s artworks, plastic is listed as the sole ingredient. Plastic is notorious in that it is prolifically produced (over 400 million metric tonnes per year) and can take anywhere from 20 to 500 years to decompose.
Yet, in the hands of Musukubili, this simple, controversial material is heated, moulded, crocheted and worked into a textured visual diary meant to endure and in a manner that Musukubili says is largely intuitive.
It is also a technique that has been passed down through her family’s maternal line. Musukubili’s artistic inheritance is honoured in a piece titled ‘Two Voices, One Thread’, one of two sculptures in the collection.
“This sculpture is about the relationship between me and my mom. She made the bottom of it. My mum used to crochet and my grandmother also used to crochet,” Musukubili says. “Since I crochet now, a lot of people tell me: ‘Oh, you do this like your mom’.”
Honouring legacy, distilling memory, mapping her mind and imbuing beauty into a material that could very well be here far longer than she will, Musukubili presents ‘Material Memories’ as a vibrant chronicle of a young, urban and creative life that is just getting started.
Musukubili has previously exhibited at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair and at the RMB Latitudes Art Fair in Johannesburg. Three years after her solo debut, the soft-spoken artist, whose signature technique has beguiled international audiences, feels she is well on her way.
“I’m more comfortable in my art.
I’m more free. I’m becoming a little bit more expressive, a little more abstract,” Musukubili says.
“I just want to live off what I love. At the end of the day, I think that’s what we all want,” she says. “Right now, I’m enjoying the journey.”
– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram; marthamukaiwa.com
