B.  Francistown, Botswana, 1996

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Artist Statement
Through the gestures of painting, drawing and printmaking, Louise Mandumbwa’s practice explores ideations of home from her perspective as the daughter and granddaughter of intra-continental immigrants from Zambia, Angola, and the Congo, in addition to her experience as an immigrant herself in the US.

By engaging collective memory and personal history, her work considers what is made possible when recognizable images and language begin to fall away. Employing the anecdote, the fragmented recollection and the haptic, Mandumbwa offers a translated affect and context that produces an iteration of a place that is not here. Drawing from transcribed conversations, familial archives, and her own recollections of the vibrant, changing cities she’s called home, Louise contends with the gaps in knowledge that are often part of a diasporic experience by engaging a constellations of epistemologies. Thinking about the archive as a record of a temporal experience of material realities, Mandumbwa captures those experiences  through language, image and object.

Her material vocabulary includes those commonly used to construct the homes in  Southern Africa; rendering works in graphite, charcoal, paint and ink onto concrete, wood, cast metal and glass. Her practice holds space for the ephemeral and the constant, as well as the loss and recollection built into the translation of place. Making memories into material and affect into image.