Sanaa Gateja (b. 1950 in Kisoro; lives in Kampala) creates paintings and sculptures using handmade beads attached to a barkcloth surface. The beads are made by artisans out of paper gathered from various sources, including magazines, retired school textbooks, and even flyers from past political campaigns. From the miniscule unit of the bead, the artist creates a community that extends the work beyond the studio and the gallery space. This process is related to what the artist calls the “unit construction concept,” whereby like the bead, he can use any material—from a leaf to a rock—to create forms and patterns repeated into larger works. One of his guiding principles has been a poem that he wrote and keeps in his studio:
A dot is a dot is a dot likely to burst into millions of dots
Black, red, green, blue, yellow and gold so far and yet close
A raindrop rolling off a leaf and swallowed by hungry earth
A dot is a dot it is your village a community a voice in the hills
A cell a life a force of light to keep the fire burning.
For Gateja, the bead also becomes a talisman within which “you have material, letters, and information, and you have the hands that rolled it.” By using barkcloth and beads instead of canvas and pigments, Gateja has developed a methodology that introduces recycled and locally sourced material and labor to create works that respond to social concerns and communal desires.
