Abena Motaboli is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, originally from Lesotho. Her work incorporates painting with natural materials (coffee, tea, dirt, flowers), papermaking, poetry, installation and performance to speak to ideas of home, memory, belonging. She received her BFA from Columbia College Chicago and L'institut Catholique de Paris in Paris, France.
“I make paintings with tea, coffee, dirt, flowers, natural materials. I’ve been dipping into sound work, related to writing and poetry. I start with writing for everything that I do, then move onto painting and performance, I also do installations, made with plastics that I’ve been carrying around with me for 10 years, plastic tarps from the hardware store. I started using them when I was at Columbia College, tearing them apart and it was very much talking about the idea of home or the idea of belonging and carrying these things with me wherever I go and creating a little house or womb or comforting place to be in. I also thought a lot about memories and fragments and the holes in your memory when you’ve been in a different place that’s not your home for over 10 years and thinking about things that disappear and how you can’t access certain memories but you get to create new ones.”
WORKSHOPS WITH ENVISION UNLIMITED
Abena led a series of workshops with Envision members sharing aspects of her own studio practice and exploring the material of our garden: papermaking with plants and recycled paper, pressed plant prints, eco-dyeing, bundle-dyeing, painting with natural pigments (tea, coffee, turmeric, flowers). Participants harvested flowers, created pigments from plant materials, dyed fabrics and cloth masks, pressed flowers and leaves into paper and experimented with making paper out of recycled paper material and plants.
“I’ve done a couple of painting workshops with the Westtown residents using turmeric, coffee, tea, flowers from the garden, coreopsis, golden marguerite, marigolds, Japanese indigo. We did botanical bundle dyes, it’s one of the most fascinating mediums because everyone creates something so different every time: how much iron you add or where you put the flowers—it’s not going to be the same as when I do it. I’m so in my head all the time doing what I’m doing and then seeing what someone else does with the same medium is super cool. A lot of the time my work and the mediums I use are very exploratory, just like life, it’s back and forth until you find something. Sometimes the material goes where you don’t want it and you push it back—you figure it out together. I look at my material like it’s alive and we’re in a relationship together.”
STUDIO
While in residence at TWM, Abena got to know our garden and made work that engaged with the garden on multiple levels. From drawings and plant meditations to bundle-dyeing and papermaking, Abena created a body of work that explored the material possibilities of the garden itself, finding color, pattern and texture in the integration of plant with fabric, paper and text.
“I’ve been getting into plant gratitude and reciprocity, thinking about Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist. She talks about the way we should be living in right relationship with plants and the world, how can we give back instead of always taking and how can we listen to our more-than-human kin. It’s been really nice to spend mornings here, drawing plants and looking at them, watching them, being with them. I came here the other day and was just sitting with the woad thinking ‘wow you’re beautiful!’ “