We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Fungai Marima . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Fungai below.

Hi Fungai , thanks for joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

In my formative years, my introduction to art and design, or ‘art’ was out of a necessity to communicate and express myself through painting and drawing, what I couldn’t or hadn’t learnt to articulate in words. I then continued making art in school and realised through getting better grades than most of my subjects that, possibly there was something to pursue. This then meant my education had a focus on art, from doing a diploma in art, then progressing into undertaking a BA (Hons) in Fine Art, and quite recently in 2019-2020 I put myself through a Masters degree in Visual Arts – Printmaking. I have learnt how to express myself through various internal dialogue on how and what I was feeling, specifically looking back on my childhood, dealing with loss, grief, and how I witnessed domestic violence and abuse.

In hindsight, I believe the path I took and the pace at which it has gone has worked out for me and the work is internal, though I have now turned it into a career. If I was to really look into my practice, maybe I could have believed in myself a lot more, known my work and not looked for validation from others. Which then leads into the skill that has been most essential in my practice – consistency. I believe that consistency is what has allowed me continue to push myself, my practice, because the more I do, the more I think about what I’m doing the more I see different paths to explore, and more things to learn.

Financial obstacles I believe have stood in the way, it can be a challenge at times to create thinking space for your practice whilst earning a living, doing your ‘income’ job. Though I have found ways of making it work and I believe diversifying oneself, through the multiple avenues you explore and are exposed to, allows me to broaden my practice and how I approach it. Also, certain projects take a longer time to be realised because of limited finances to bring it to life.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a multi-disciplinary artist whose works investigate ideas around the body as an archive. I’m interested in highlighting and thinking through gestures as language. I look into the mundane everyday human experiences and the political, through themes of trauma and displacement. My interest in the gestures of the body has allowed my practice to think about what our human bodies experience, what our bodies can tell us about memory, displacement and our lived environment whether that is physically or emotionally. The body acts as a tool, and a site of knowledge, that I explore to talk about issues within contemporary culture. Key texts and theorists I’m interested in are, The Body Keeps The Score, Bessel van der Kolk, Bodies, Susie Orbach, In praise of hands, Henri Focillon and African culture historian Pathisa Nyathi on the importance of an active not passive body in communicating various ways of understanding cultures and experiences. My practice is an on-going conversation with the body, with movement as a way of ‘knowing’ and extraction. My current focus is looking into parallel relationship between printmaking and performance. I’m interested in the archiving various narratives within performance through printmaking. I am drawn to printmaking as it can be a very tactile process in how I approach image making within my practice. I’m also interested in how printmaking is quite radical, in how you can disseminate information and ideas in an accessible way, in which archival material can be very difficult. The moving performing body is integral to my work, a work that I’ll bring to light is my recent piece ‘Walking’, s performance piece in which I walked onto 2 metal (zinc) plates that etching ink had been thinly applied. Time was integral to the artwork, as it was an 8 hour walking performance, that gave commentary and explored what alternate ways of communicating the feeling of ‘burn out’, over working could be understood through the moving body. The artwork exists in various form such as, video, photography and printed works. With this work I wanted to be able to physically experience what a ‘normal’ working day felt like, how being in that state of constant movement, can take a toll on you both mentally and physically and all for the wrong unhealthy reasons.
My work presents a moment in which, one might take a moment and pay attention to what the body is communicating in this very work walk work, non-stop, pressure filled society we live in. I am most proud of the collaborative projects I have been a part of, working with people that are specialists in their field and seeing how the commitment I give to my practice inspires the people that are close to me, especially the young people in my environment.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

My network.

I wish I had paid more attention to the people around me that are driven and are consistently pushing themselves to know more and learn more. I believe I spent most of the time looking out for opportunities and not necessarily letting my network know what my interests and passions are. Because as I am learning that more and more, and opening myself up to be vulnerable to my network, more opportunities and exciting conversations and collaborations are starting to come to life.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I believe I’m trying to learn how to slow down and pay attention to my body. Therefore, as I continue working ans sharing my work with others, the intention is to create that moment of pause, contemplation and dialogue that allows the audience to learn with me. I know what it feels like to be kept hostage by traumatic experiences and observations, they create a believable narrative of a lack of confidence in self, lack of trust etc. And I believe my practice has given me that space to feel, to feel what my body is feeling and try pay attention to that, and work on making my everyday experiences more bearable. Being able to understand your own body means you question when things feel unsafe or uncomfortable, or you allow and accept joy and love. Might I add, this is of course a life long journey.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.fungaimarima.co.uk/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/fungaimarima?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fungai-marima-16247a112
• Other: Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/fungaimarima

Image Credits
David Mensah B Owusu-Nyantekyi Justin Piperger