When Elizabeth Ashamu Deng lost her elder sister and her job, it forced her to align herself with her creative side, stifled from childhood. She then curated perhaps one of the most therapeutic exhibitions ever witnessed at the One-Off Contemporary Art Gallery in Nairobi.
Titled 'Your Future is Bright', the show is a beautiful print and shade experience. Looking at the cerulean blues is calming, akin to staring at the vast ends of an ocean, virgin from human interference.
In the show, Ashamu works with cyanotype as her primary medium. Cyanotype is an old 9th-century camera-less photographic printing process that produces cyan-blue prints using UV light (sunlight) and iron salt solutions.
In the show, all the portraits are created from treating the papers and clothes that form subjects with a chemistry that is UV- sensitive, which in return lusters them with the calming blue that is the primary colour of her pieces.
“A Kanga Series” cyanotype artworks by Elizabeth Ashamu Deng on display at the One Off Contemporary Art Gallery in Nairobi, March 11, 2026.
Photo credit: Bonface Bogita | Nation Media Group
'Your Future is Bright' is an exploratory inquest into patterns through the lenses of the sun. It plays with a collage of series and themes fused from Ashamu’s Nigerian background as well as her Kenyan experience.
In the Adire series, she plays around with square mosaics and the staves and staffs of music to create bedazzling patterns heavily borrowed from her Yoruba ancestry and English classical music.
In the series, Ashamu’s titch woven imprints of Claude Debussy’s Claire de Lune, sheet music pieces, is a grand attempt to mirror the music mood of the classical piece with visual art through the use of a traditional print style ordinarily woven on Kente clothes in West Africa.
For Ashamu’s work, the music piece was printed on cyanotype and then cut up and stitched in silver to create a background of musical notes.
The portrait gracefully mimics the dreamy atmosphere traditionally created by the musical piece, which is known to focus more on mood and texture as opposed to the traditional rigid structure of classical music. This impressionist piece, Ashamu says, was inspired by her husband, who is a pianist.
“I am very visual, and my husband is very auditory. I had fun taking something that is auditory and making it visual. As someone who doesn’t read music, it was fun playing around with the patterns of the notes from a complicated musical piece and attempting to create a relaxed watery feeling piece from it.”
“Solar Botanicals” cyanotype artworks by Elizabeth Ashamu Deng on display at the One Off Contemporary Art Gallery in Nairobi, March 11, 2026.
Photo credit: Bonface Bogita | Nation Media Group
She adds, “For the show, I picked everything that resonates with radiance. For the Adire series, the patterns used would traditionally have been in indigo, but I had fun lacquering it with gold to give it that sparkle and movement through the shimmering colours.”
Her series on “Solar Botanicals” pays heed to the patterns created by flowers. It builds on the theme of brightness with a focus on how the radiant shapes of flowers resemble the sun.
The close-ups of flowers imprinted on cyanotype are representations of the perfect imperfections of nature. They emphasise the geometry of her subjects which in tandem brings out the patterns that form the body, creating structured beauty.
Grieving artist
Despite the beauty of the exhibition, the genesis of the show is derived from a tumultuous experience in the artist's life. “At the end of 2024, I lost my sister, and then I lost my career. I was a diplomat with USAid, managing humanitarian assistance.
Dealing with this was emotionally difficult, both at a personal and at a professional level. During this process, my aunt told me, “your future is bright”. Sometimes people say the right things, and it is those few words that can really change your life. When she said that, I grasped onto those words, and it is something I kept repeating to myself every day to maintain a positive outlook,” she says.
'Your Future is Bright', in hindsight, is a showcase of a grieving artist creating from the depths of her fears and sorrows. The show is a canvas expressing positivity in the glare of sorrow and uncertainty, and therein lies its beauty.
“Shade” cyanotype artworks by Elizabeth Ashamu Deng on display at the One Off Contemporary Art Gallery in Nairobi, March 11, 2026.
Photo credit: Bonface Bogita | Nation Media Group
The “Kanga” series in the show pays homage to the garb of our mothers' prime, but with a twist from Ashamu’s point of view. She writes messages of positivity and healing from her loss and grief amidst floral patterns and drawings, and imprints from her environs.
The show gives vitality to an old technique through the integration of patterns, collaborations with nature and showcasing that perhaps, geometry, if well done, can also glisten art form.
'Your Future is Bright', in the words of the artist, is ultimately a hopeful body of work- a celebration of survival, possibility and the joy of creating, shaped by loss but guarded by light.
