Agnes Waruguru is a Kenyan artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, printmaking, needlework, and installation. Waruguru often draws inspiration from reproductive labour practices and everyday life. Through processes of stitching, layering, and mark-making, she reimagines how personal and collective histories can be held within the fibers of a material.
Her work is grounded in materiality and a sensibility for negative space. Seemingly abstract, her works draw from memory, personal experience, and astute cultural references. This abstraction of reality unfolds into lyrical landscapes that hover between truth and perception.
Her forms echo bodies found in nature; from organs, tissues, or insides to sea vegetation and shifting underwater passages. This fluid, ethereal quality speaks to themes of transformation, mimicry, and adaptation, and is reminiscent of greater changes, such as the shifting sea temperatures and the ocean’s evolving ecosystems. In this way, her work forges a space to consider identity and character not as fixed, but as dynamic processes constantly shaped by the tide of the environment, history, and intimate experience.
She received a BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, USA, and has exhibited internationally in Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, France, the United States, and across Europe. She has participated in numerous residencies, including the Saba Artist Residency in Lamu, Kenya, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. In 2024, her work was exhibited in Foreigners Everywhere, the main exhibition of the 60th Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa.
Moving between her birthplace of Kenya and adopted homes abroad, Waruguru expands notions of identity and belonging, framing them not as fixed but instead as unfinished, dynamic, and adaptive.