Nairobi-based visual artist Thandiwe Muriu is celebrated internationally for creating dazzling, thought-provoking photographic installations featuring African women. Typically, her sitters are centrally positioned within each frame and styled with sculptural artefacts as eyewear, artfully arranged hairdos, dramatic make-up and colourfully patterned garments camouflaged against backdrops of the same fabric.
These carefully combined signature motifs create optical illusions that provoke debate about whether the female figures are emerging from or disappearing into the background. Each trick of the eye, therefore, provides an opportunity for the artist to use her compositions as canvases through which to symbolically represent and reflect on women’s changing life experiences, levels of agency and visibility within the social, political, economic and cultural ‘fabric’ of Kenyan society.
Clouds Bring Blessings
To date, Thandiwe Muriu has tended to use highly decorative, machine-printed Ankara fabrics within her installations. However, for her most recent series of images – presented at 193 Gallery, Paris, as part of her third solo exhibition “Clouds Bring Blessings” (8 November 2025 – 15 January 2026) – the artist created her own textiles, using traditional tie-and-dye techniques learned from collectives of fellow Kenyan women. The fabric-making process allowed her to engage in life-affirming conversations about her nation’s textile heritage, achieve a sense of community and sisterhood with other female creatives in Kenya, and also become more deeply connected to the natural environment as an integral aspect of the storytelling within her artworks.
Learning about and participating in the twisting, tying, dip-dyeing and drying of fabrics in the heat of the East African sun led the artist to produce a short documentary film for the exhibition to acknowledge the handiwork of her fellow community members, and also to illustrate how the air, heat and humidity of Kenya’s coastal climate near Mombasa served as environmental “co-creators” in the fabric design process. Reflecting on the creative choreography of human ingenuity and nature coming together, Thandiwe remarked:
“This isn’t just a series about fabric. It is about impact, about the undeniable entanglement between what we make and the world we make it in.”
In total, twenty tie-dyed fabrics were displayed alongside seven photographic installations within the gallery. Each artwork was given a name that represented Thandiwe Muriu’s memories of her kinship with the environment during particular moments of the production process. The featured fabrics were also named in reference to the contributing craftswomen and local settings associated with their designs.
Photography as an expressive voice
The gift of a camera from her father when she was 14 years old is regarded as the moment when Thandiwe Muriu began to find her expressive voice, develop her observational skills behind the lens and set her sights on photography as her future vocation. Her subsequent pioneering achievements as a commercial fashion photographer and also a leading figure within the field of lens-based contemporary visual art have since helped to transform and redefine societal expectations of girls and women with ambitions to pursue careers in the male-dominated world of photography – not only within Kenya, but also internationally.
Further details about Thandiwe Muriu’s creative practice and outstanding body of work are presented in her book, “Camo” (Chronicle Books, 2024), and also on her web space – https://thandiwemuriu.com/.
Web links and further information
193 Gallery (2025) Thandiwe Muriu: Clouds Bring Blessings. Retrieved January 6, 2026, from https://www.193gallery.com/exhibitions/58-thandiwe-muriu-clouds-bring-blessings/
Jackson, E. (Host) and Muriu, T. (Artist). (2025, November 4). Thandiwe Muriu: She turns African fabrics into optical illusions and the world can’t look away. [Television broadcast segment]. In Arts24. FRANCE 24. https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/arts24/20251104-thandiwe-muriu-she-turns-african-fabrics-into-optical-illusions-and-the-world-can-t-look-away (Duration: 11 mins.)
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