By Precious Adesina
In a painting from the series A Day of Rest, the London and Chicago based painter Wangari Mathenge depicts three women sitting by the fireplace in her studio in Kenya. Subtitled “Kemunto, Mary and Sarah” (2023), a short-haired lady in a green dress places her hand on one of her friend’s foreheads as they stare back at her, resting their hand on her shoulder. The third woman gazes into the distance while the pair interact. While it is unclear exactly what is happening in the piece, Wangari paints the details of their braids and afro-textured hair, their nonchalant facial expressions and the colours of their clothes, with a carefulness, warmth and precision.
The A Day of Rest series portrays 20 women the artist found through an organisation that trains and empowers domestic workers. The first paintings in the series were created in 2023. Wangari will be painting further works this year. “I was thinking about all the different depictions and stories that revolve around the domestic workforce, and I realised that it's always very negatively skewed,” she says. “I thought about how wonderful it would be to see them in a different light.” In “Muthoni” (2023), a woman relaxes on a brown sofa. In “Rehema” (2023), a woman fans open the pages of a small book. In “For Chantal and Arthur” (2023), Wangari paints a woman sleeping.
The portraits are from the days that the women she painted visited her studio in Kenya to unwind, eat, chat, relax and sit for her. “I asked them specifically how they would like to be depicted in the paintings and to pose accordingly,” she says. “Another thing I did was ask them to come with an item that they felt was important to them. The items were either uplifting — one brought a pocket Bible; another brought an inspirational book — or were [tied to] self-care. Someone brought lotion they use to counteract the damage to their hands from harsh detergents.”
That said, when the women in “Kemunto, Mary and Sarah” sat, Wangari thought their poses were a little unorthodox. “I just did not understand the way they were communicating,” she says. “The placing of a hand on a forehead in many African traditions is usually reserved for an elder blessing a younger person.” In this case, the younger person is making the gesture, and they are both in their 20s. “I thought I was just humouring them and would then choose a more conservative pose they assumed because that lends itself well to painting.” But when it was time to create the portraits, Wangari found that poses like theirs were more intriguing. “All the poses which I would not have done myself are the ones that I finally chose, and I thought, ‘They knew what they were doing,’” she says. “I loved the fact that I was outside of that process because if I had gotten involved with their poses, it would've been less of them and more of me. I'm glad that this is pretty much all of them.”
The artist first had the idea for this series during the pandemic after reading about how Kenyan domestic workers are treated. Having housekeepers, chefs or cleaners is more commonplace in Kenya than in Western countries, Wangari explains, noting that people from all social standings hire them. “I make this joke, though I think it's true, that even domestic workers can have domestic workers,” she says. Even though they have the same rights as any other employee in the country — healthcare, paid holiday and maternity leave, for example — due to the precarity of the job, they are often still overworked and underpaid. “Because they are very informally hired, employers may not even know the law,” she says. They are also at risk of sexual and gender-based violence.
Wangari read about Kenyan domestic workers stuck in other countries, like many who are unable to return from the Middle East. Kenyan workers migrate hoping to find better pay and opportunities just to find themselves exploited. “Workers have agents who find employment for them. These agents facilitate their transportation and ensure they have passports and can travel,” Wangari says. “In some instances, there's some deceit behind it, and when the domestic workers go abroad, the work they encounter is not what they expected.” She says that many of them try to return home but aren’t able to for many reasons, including being unable to retrieve their passport from the agent. Wangari hopes her series will add to a positive perception of domestic workers, resulting in them being treated with more care.
For Wangari, it was vital that she paid the models to ensure the women were not losing out on money by participating, though her priority was for the domestic workers she portrayed to de-stress in any way they wished. “It was shocking for them, because when they came to the studio, they were all expecting to be posing and waiting. I said, ‘No, actually, you get this day to rest, and we'll figure out how to paint you while you're resting,’” she says. “What I thought was important was recognising them as very valuable in our society — just as valuable as the owner of the house.”
