borrowed intimacy

Wanja Kimani’s borrowed intimacy series looks at the process of assimilation into a new surrounding; the act of engaging and creating a new place to belong whilst still holding on to the memory of the previous place. Taking her own experience, Kimani looked back at the conscious and subconscious processes that led her to see England as her home. An embroidered text sits on white cotton dill, with a print of an image repeated from one to the next, with material and image consistently fading like a tenuous memory.

In the text, the object of the artist’s affection is her memory of home and the realisation that she left this home behind. The place has moved on and changed; her memories of this home are not necessarily its current reality. If the past is a foreign country, borrowed intimacy is an elegant map of the journey Kimani has taken from there, its complex emotion beautifully conveyed through word and material.