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"Joan Nanfuka creates large-scale, immersive abstract paintings that redefine our sense of place. Through cutting and stitching she merges the physicality of the Burren landscape with the textiles of her native Uganda, fusing both locations into a broader understanding of the spaces we inhabit"
- Mary Hawkes Greene, president, Burren College of Art, Ireland.
"Landscape, stone and the subterranean underworld of the Burren manifests in the paintings of Joan Nanfuka. In her large-scale abstractions paint becomes a fluid, mutable language that is punctuated by cuts and apertures in the canvas. Here, the canvas becomes both skin and fabric that is opened, stitched and reconfigured to collapse the specificity of the Burren into a hybrid zone that merges with African textiles. The rocks, stones and Neolithic circular motifs of Uganda and Ireland fold into one another in these works, and create energised temporal fields of colour that foreground a universal connection between ritual and the natural world"
- Conor McGrand, Dean, Burren College of Art, Ireland.
"The Examined Life
It strikes me that all three of these artists, Joan, Angel, and Sherry are engaged in answering the question “Who am I called to be?”
Carl Jung maintained that “life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries, which are yet one.”¹ We can never say with any certitude what the journey has been about, but the more you demark the stages of your lived existence, the more likely it is that you can shed the detritus of the past, and begin the process of letting go and of transformation.
Sometimes the mask of the self sticks. Sometimes it becomes the projection of an illusory self. Sometimes we remain lost.
If there is conscious interrogation of the self then there is the possibility of ultimately determining a substantive presence, or as Jung might say; “only the man or woman who can consciously assent to the power of the inner voice becomes a personality.”²
A number of years ago I was near the village of Caberets in central France and I went to visit the cave system of Pech Merle, and saw the dappled horses and the fallen man, and the ghost prints of hands. The pairings of animals alluded to an architectural order, a placement of polarities, of light and dark, dry and moist, male and female, bison and stag. In this theatre of signs, and symbols, and archetypes, it was apparent that it was a livid backdrop to ritual, to ritualised enactments played out in the light of grease flares, and to the thrum of a shamanistic beat.
With these three artists we have something akin to that ancient desire to dance in a shamanistic arena and move beyond the boundaries of the encoded self to a more capacious self -knowing, self-grounded and liberated personality that fearlessly remembers and fearlessly forgets. All of the marks, all of the exposures, all of the vulnerabilities these three artists display relate to the organic tensions of their lived realities.
In Joan’s case it is the tension of climatic polarities, of hot and cold, of light and dark, that render a tension in her work. And of course in her work there is the spatial, imaginative, and symbolic weight of the sea, and the water memory of the desert. The landscapes of Uganda and the Burren are interred with stones, stones marked with lichens and circles, natural and symbolic forms representing correspondences and alignments in nature. There is a brutalisation of the canvas surface which hints at the journey she has negotiated and the parts of the self she has both interred and disinterred..."
- Frank Golden, Head of creative writing Burren College of Art, Ireland.
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