African Women's Art

I’m excited to share this conversation with the amazing Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is a Kenyan writer who describes herself as a human witness to human happenings. She creates literary kintsugi’s that makes loss meaningful, repairs, and creates space for epistemic recovery.
She won the Caine Prize for African Writing for The Weight of Whispers and is the author of Dust (2014) and The Dragonfly Sea (2019). She is a global speaker on geopolitics and world-building. She is also a co-founder of the Macondo Literary Festival, Nairobi’s literary festival connecting Africa’s histories and futures through literature.
In our conversation we discuss her novel The Dragonfly Sea which poetically explores African Oceanic imagination through a coming of age story. We explore her powerful Keynote Address at Wakati Wetu Festival in 2025 and Yvonne shares how research and joy are an important part of her practice.

Find out more about Yvonne’s work;
On X @AdhiamboKe (X)
On Instagram @flamboyant_tree (IG)
Listen to the Wakati Wetu Keynote Address
Macondo Literary Festival website

Photograph (c) Alvin Pang

I’m delighted to share this deeply resonant conversation I had with The Psyber Giantess. The Psyber Giantess is an interdisciplinary dance artist, painter, writer and musician.

The Psyber Giantess is an amazing thinker, feeler and seer who beautifully visualises the unseen. Their artistic practice involves creating identity-centric self-portraits and artwork inspired by nature, Black feminine divinity, spiritual awakening, and psychedelia. Their work reflects cultural intersectionality, the unseen Black African ‘inner’ experience; and healing through self-processing of inner trauma and spiritual awakening.
In our conversation we talk about movement as medicine, listening for the Divine, working with psychedelics, and healing through the artistic journey.

Find out more about their work at;
Instagram the_psyber_giantess
Youtube The psyber Giantess
Medium @dianawritesrecovery
Substack: @dianawritesrecovery

I am delighted to share this conversation with the brilliant Ebun Sodipo. Ebun is a prolific artist and writer whose work spans performance, installation, video, and text. She creates work for black trans people of the future, guided by black feminist study with a methodology of collage and fabulation.
I think of Ebun work as a beautiful mirror. It locates and produces real and imagined narratives of black trans women’s presence, embodiment and interiority across the past, present and future. There is a richness, tenderness and depth to her work that soothes, welcomes and calls to the body's memory.
In this episode we discussed the significance of water and the importance of connecting to the body in the creative process. We also spoke about Ebun’s research into the ancestor, Vitoria, whose story gestures to an alternative gender system and way of relating to the body, and the questions and imaginative possibilities it opens up.

Find out more about Ebun's work;
Ebun’s instagram
Soft Opening for information on works, exhibitions and bio
Following the Gourd, FACT, 2022
Following the Gourd ⁠interactive map⁠

I am delighted to share my conversation with the inspiring Everlyn Nicodemus. Everlyn is one of the strongest feminist voices to come out of Eastern Africa over the past 30 years, and an incredibly prolific artist, writer, and curator.
I think of Everlyn Nicodemus as a “lamplight” — a term used by civil rights activist Vincent Harding to describe people who light the way and show us what’s possible.
Everlyn was born in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania in 1954, and her life has been shaped by movement — something she reflects on in both her writing and her art. She’s lived across Europe, in Sweden, France, and Belgium, before eventually settling in the UK. Her experiences of racism and cultural trauma have shaped a really powerful and distinctive body of work, including paintings, collaged books, mixed-media pieces, and poetry, often using unexpected materials like metal netting, sisal, textiles, and found objects. Her work explores personal and cultural trauma, but also the role art can play in healing.
As an art historian and academic she has been instrumental in building knowledge about African modernism. She has published widely, with her critical essays on art, philosophy, transculturalism and postmodernity appearing in Third Text (where she also sat on the advisory board) and other major journals. She also co-authored the book 'Modern Art in Africa, Asia and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms'.
In this conversation, we talk about how studying anthropology led her to centre dialogue in her practice. We discuss her 'Woman in the World' project, how she explores silence especially around women’s experiences. We chat about how her practice connects to trauma studies, which she researched in her PhD on African Modern Art and Black Cultural Trauma at Middlesex University in 2012.

Find out more about Everyln Nicodemus’s work
National Galleries of Scotland exhibition and catalogue 
Recent exhibition at Wiels, Belgium, Black Bird
Richard Saltoun Gallery

I’m delighted to share this wonderful conversation with Zoë . Zoë is an artist-curator working under the artist name, Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie.

They engage with clay and image (re)production to process, understand and share articulations of the world around them. Their practice is a site for them to: breathe; reconfigure; play; be (a)live; shift through space; exist in multiple temporalities.

For me there is a beautiful conversational quality to Zoë’s practice. It feels like a flowing dialogue between friends. Full of humour, play, honesty and that secret shorthand that builds over time.

We spoke ahead of Zoë’s solo exhibition, aweys gaun, which will be showing at Many Studios for Glasgow International this year. The exhibition portals to a dream that drenches over and seeps through the stories of Western modernity, specifically the chapters leading up and dedicated to an enlightened Caledonia. aweys gaun honours the longstanding ‘hereness’ of Black life in Scotland, calling and responding to, swaying with, the Black Atlantic hum.

In our conversation we explore and how these dialogue's show up in their collaborative practice with writers and other artists, and in working with different materials including clay.

Do visit aweys gaun at Many Studios during Glasgow International, Friday 5th - Sunday 21 June 2026.

Readings from;
'Experiments in Imagining Otherwise' by Lola Olufemi, 2021
'Dear Science and Other Stories' by Katherine McKittrick, 2020

Website: https://zoetumika.com/