Serigraphy is the oldest printing method, with roots dating back to 960–1279 AD, but it was popularised in 15th-century Japan, where artists used it to transfer designs to silk. It is a uniquely rare form of art practice, and to experience one under the eaves of a Kenyan gallery is purely magical.

Her practice oscillates between Kenya and Chicago, US but the fundamentals of her art practice were first instilled at Kuona Arts Trust before she relocated to the US, where she teaches and mentors young artists.

Jess describes herself as an artist who dabbles in printmaking, weaving and sculpting. Her work largely revolves around the post-colonial archives and photography, where she investigates what it means to be African, African modernism and what it entails to have a visual culture within an African identity.

Traditionally, photography has always been fundamental to her work, but recent times have seen her broaden her repertoire of media.

Her show explores, amongst many other things, the themes of haunting and ghosts, a nosedive into the years of colonialism and post-independence era and how crucial they were to black culture and African modernism. Her sculptures explore architecture and practices borrowed from her travels across the continent, something she says came about organically for her.

“It kind of came organically, thinking about modernism and visual culture, whereby you cannot fail to talk about the built environment and how that also compels the social structure of African/Black life. This is because my themes of post-colonial independence and colonisation, but also, I look at the architecture through the brutalist architecture because it was the language of the modern when Africa was getting her independence in the 1960’s,” she says.

For Jess, brutalist architecture is the mark of the modern black culture ideologies and the promises of a bright future, but her sculptured buildings are metaphors to ghosts haunting the land, weaving narratives of the unfilled promises. The sculptures and print images on the canvas all tell the same story of a past conjoined to the future.

“The buildings are from all over Africa and not just from Kenya, and they have been selected according to the things that were happening at the time(independence) and their particular context. The sculptures are more than just mere reflections of buildings; they are majorly about what these buildings represent and how architecture can be used as a lens to talk about the structures of the people, what it means to have African modernism, which is non-linear compared to Western modernism. How can we compare our traditional ways and also be modern, such that modernism is not also defined by the Western standard?’ She asks.

For a visual artist who describes printmaking as her first love, her dedication to the practice isn’t in question in the show. Layers of colour lie intricately on her subjects, highlighting form, figure posture and like the relics they are, subjecting the viewers to a walk down memory lane. The wealth of her practice is partly contributed to by her exposure to two different jurisdictions, distinctive from each other, in which she engages in her practice.

“I was an artist here before I moved abroad. I used to work at Kuona Trust, but prior to that, I had a practice as a graphic designer. I went to school in Chicago for my Master’s in Fine Arts, where I learned about screen printing and molding amongst other things. I founded the Nairobi Print Project, which is a 3-part project, a journal, a podcast and a studio, I would say that I never rest, sometimes I think that my teaching is an extension of my artistic life because I am engulfed in art every day, my art teaching is a friendship of mutuality with my art because they are complementary of each other,” she says.

From a mental perspective, she acknowledges that the workings of the economy and the political turmoil which has been the bane of world economies creates a difficult environment for practicing artists.

“There is a lot of political and social tension with things and time always changing in our environment, the world is changing all over, and I think, like Wangari Maathai, you have to do one little thing at a time, planting seeds as they are in people, in yourself as a practice, one small thing done every day will create a change. There is a romanticised idea of what an artist’s life looks like, where they are mirrors of society and their art does everything positive for society, but art is also exhausting because artists are thinkers and makers, all of which are mental and physical labour. At the end of the day, art is just a job, everyone is mentally all over!” she says.

Her print works of serigraph on canvas look like a walk down memory lane in the precolonial and just after the post-colonial period because they are made from negatives of photographed subjects picked from that era. The images in their simplicity showcase the daily life of her subjects.

“It speaks to community, it speaks to harambee, it speaks to togetherness, it speaks to a kind of way of life that we are used to but is now going away. When people talk about black quotidian, what is its equivalent of the African quotidian? These images are kind of pulling at all those strings,” she says.

She acknowledges the difference in the nature of her practice of art in Chicago as compared to Nairobi.

“It is easier to produce art in the US because of access to materials and institutions that support art as compared to here in Nairobi. It is a more comfortable place to experiment and be more immersed in the scene, the conversations about blackness, Africa and the relation to the world are more compared to here. It is a place in which I feel more nourished, but home is home, I still love Nairobi, and I get a lot of my inspiration from here inasmuch as there is still a lot of work yet to be done to support artists,” she says.