‘The Fabric of Our Being’: Dera exhibition salutes essence of womanhood

April has been doing commissioned portraits ever since she was 16 (2003), but it was in 2020 when she resigned her job and fully immerse herelf in visual art.

Unlike many of her peers, she didn’t study art. Her background is in molecular biology, but it was portrait commissioning that got her out of tight financial fixes as a student and when she was working.

The Covid-19 period was her nudge into full-time practice as a visual artist because she felt she had nothing else to give in her regular 9-5-day job. She took a leave for the first time in a long while to finish off a commission that had been paid for earlier.

Working on that portrait grounded her for the years to come. She wanted a world where she could paint full-time. A conversation with an artist and an art dealer formed the pivot of her career. She had asked them for the drawbacks of doing art full-time time and from their answers, she curated a solution to each con.

Her first year was good because she lived off commissions, her second year was a pitfall, a learning period where everything dried up. Still, going back to employment wasn’t an option. She delved into selling prints and merchandise alongside her paintings. She visited more galleries, attended more art workshops to catch up with the industry. She describes it as a period of “getting her feet wet”.

The Fabric of Our Being is a follow-up to her fist show titled Rest, The Pursuit of Peace and continues to build on the theme of rest with a dab of sensuality.

The latter was a response to personal feelings, a visually explorative inquest into the exhaustion she had experienced from switching jobs and life itself, a shared feeling with her girlfriends who became muses to some of her murals. It sought to explore the feelings of fatigue because of adulthood, whereby responsibilities seem to be in a mayhem.

The Fabric of Our Being, however, is a more explorative sensual inquest into rest if an ode to Somalia, as some works have been titled, is anything to go by. They depict human feet captured in different poses, ankle beads adding to the tryst, all in a state of rest.

Dominantly, the feet are covered in deras, which is the leitmotif of this current show. It explores contradictions in a manner to suggest that life isn’t linear, colourful or greyscale but a combination of everything. Life is spiced by the variety of a free roll.

The visual art on display showcases an artist with a neat understanding of colour, a love for oil on canvas and an exaggerated palate when it comes to painting foliage, which forms a distinctive part of the bodyworks.

April isn’t shy to be her own muse, albeit in a vulnerable manner. She paints in a style that lures you in not to critique but to admire. She embodies a generation of painters that showcase art for what it really is; beautiful, insightful and profoundly demure. Her captions to the paintings are a crack at witticism, borrowed from a Kenyan context.

The departure point of the exhibition is rest, the dera becomes the tool that April uses not-so-subtly to bring across the message. In approaching the exhibition, she wanted a universal tool that one could easily understand what she meant at a glance. What better way to communicate relaxation to Kenyans than with a dera?

“It is considered a non-verbal ‘do-not disturb’ sign. The dera is fit for purpose for women across the Horn of Africa to Yemen because it is light, airy and good for the hot desert areas and the hot and humid places. It is also loose, making it Sharia-compliant. It is a modest gown, but at the Kenya Coastal region, it is a very sensual gown, maybe because of the way it drapes over our bodies, especially when you are a curvaceous woman. The way it moves along with women when they move is very sensual,” she says.

The paradox between modesty and sensuality created by the dera became a subject of intrigue to April. She was fascinated by how a fabric could be considered almost as a lingerie in one community and another, a Sharia-compliant piece of clothing in a religiously conservative context.

The dera became an experimental subject to April almost unconsciously. She took short videos of herself wearing the dera and going about her daily house chores back at home. These private moments became part of her exhibition as an installation in the gallery.

“On one hand, the dera is the perfect dress for resting and on the other hand, it is the perfect dress for working,” she says.

This perfect contradiction sent her into a rabbit hole of human opinions on the dera that featured in her art.

“Some men referred to it as a lazy dress, a cop out for women when they don’t want to put themselves together. Some men believed that it shouldn’t be worn outside the house. For women, some said that it was a modest dress they wore when they were visiting conservative in-laws. I found this contradiction intriguing,” she says.

The dera installation is titled Two Truths Can Exist as One. It has quotes for pro- dera on one side and anti-dera plastered on one side of two deras facing each other. The video installation shows the laborious part of the dera, a tool used whenever a woman wants to get work done.

The exhibition is two birds killed with one stone, April stretches herself to show not only the beauty and sensuality of the dera , but also the glaring contradiction that stems from its usage across different cultures. The show is a perfect salute to the essence of womanhood.

The exhibition curated by Rosie Olan’g and Sharon Neema runs until August 2, 2025.

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