Studio visit: Wanjiku Mwangi on cutting a city into a face
By Njeri Wachira · 4 September 2026 · 1 min read
Tea, torn newspaper, and a work-in-progress that started as a complaint about bus fare. We spent an afternoon in Kawangware.
The studio is a converted shopfront with a bead curtain and a wall of small paper drawers labelled by hand: FACES, HANDS, SKY, RECEIPTS (BLUE).
Wanjiku works standing. Each figure starts as a single torn silhouette — no pencil underdrawing, she says, because pencil is already a lie about where the edge will go.
On the obituaries series
The newest piece uses obituary columns donated by families who wanted the names kept somewhere other than a drawer. The faces in the series are composites; the names inside them are not.
“Every name in that work was printed twice: once by the newspaper, once by the person who kept it.”
She prints small editions of the studies so the series can travel to people who will never see the wall in person. That's what the edition money funds — paper, ink, and the courier to Mombasa.
