In this interview with The Art Momentum, Pamela Enyonu shares insight into Where Ffene Grows: Whispering Greens, her SOLO presentation at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2026. Enyonu’s latest body of work is a quiet yet resonant meditation on belonging, material memory, and the layered histories carried within everyday forms. Working with paper, paint, and found materials, she builds textured surfaces that hold traces of time, migration, and care — drawing on botanical metaphors, such as the jackfruit tree (or ffene), to consider identity as something accumulated, adaptive, and in constant negotiation.
A sound piece created especially for the fair by the artist is available at the end of this interview.
In Where Ffene Grows: Whispering Greens, the new body of work you have created for the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, you continued building textured surfaces through layers of paper and paint. These seem to hold quiet traces and whispered stories. How do you understand the act of listening to these layers within your practice, and what do they come to reveal about identity, memory, and belonging?
I don’t think of the surfaces as something I impose meaning onto. They accumulate. At first glance, the work can read as surface, then form, then delicate line. The listening happens in repetition. When I layer, I’m not trying to build an image as much as I’m trying to stay with a surface long enough for it to tell me when to stop. That requires full-bodied attention; eyes, hands, emotions, all working at the same time.
A single work can hold up to twenty layers collapsed into one image. If I’m lucky, traces of earlier negotiations remain visible. That’s where the “whisper” comes from. It’s not a message. It’s a threshold.
For this collection, I led with colour as a listening device. I turned to the greens in my garden. Depicting living green is hard work. In Uganda, the land of a thousand greens, colour is seasonal and unstable. Greens slide from soft bud tones to dark leaf to brown-green, each plant carrying its own rhythm. Green is growth, but it is also decay. It’s the colour of militarism, of currency, of camouflage. It holds contradictions comfortably.
Identity for me has always been fluid. The only constant I hold with fidelity is being a woman; everything else emerges from experiences of living and working inside this body. Memory and identity appear in the work as a residue of those experiences.
For me, belonging is less about declaring origin and more about practicing attention to where I already am.
I have long sat with the idea that our taste buds are more open-minded than our brains. In previous works, I’ve explored the migratory histories of matooke — East African highland banana — and sorghum. For this collection, the jackfruit tree, ffene, has become central. Jackfruit is not indigenous to East Africa. It travelled from India across the tropics through trade and migration and settled into Ugandan, African, and Caribbean domestic ecologies. Today, it grows quietly in home gardens, feeding households; adapting to soil, climate, neglect, and care. Its history spans Asia, Africa, and the wider Global South; it belongs everywhere and nowhere at once. In Whispering Greens, ffene becomes a model for belonging as accumulation rather than purity.
The layers in the work hold the time I’ve spent with them. Recently, I’ve begun sharing those layer histories by leaving the edges of my canvases exposed — allowing small peeks behind the curtain. The work becomes a record of staying.
Over the course of your career, you’ve developed a nuanced artistic language that explores the complexities of identity, history, and gender. In what ways does your work act as an “echo” of human experience, and what do you hope it communicates about history and trauma?
I think we’ve given art a larger responsibility than it can productively carry. I’m suspicious of the idea that art can represent trauma cleanly. Trauma is discontinuous. Messy. What art can do, for me, is leave echoes; breadcrumbs of experience reverberating long after the event.
I situate the work in that after-sound. It doesn’t attempt to recreate history. It acknowledges that we live inside its residue daily, and that our experiences are shared rather than exceptional. I find that comforting. There are three in the collection (Ijeni ijo Nkolo?, E nape la Uhuru, and Senegal Chic) that attempt to sit in this residue and, to be specific, in our past and present history as colonial subjects.
Echos are softer than the original impact, but travel further. They distort, overlap, and mutate, which feels closer to how memory and identity actually function. I’m less interested in explaining history than in creating a space where viewers can feel or even touch that accumulation: the personal, the collective, the inherited.
If the work communicates anything, I hope it suggests that survival is textured. Layered. Built from small acts of endurance that rarely announce themselves as heroic.
Through your use of materials such as paper, acrylics, and gold leaf, everyday objects become metaphors for memory and identity. How do you engage with these materials as a form of “listening,” and how do they inform the conceptual depth of your practice?
I don’t fight materials. They are collaborators. Each one carries a history, and part of my role is to listen to what those histories allow. I think of myself less as a controller and more as a composer arranging conversations between substances.
Paper is a loaded material. It has documented treaties, borders, ownership, and identity. It’s the material of bureaucracy and imagination at once. I’m interested in pushing against that weight and asking what paper can do beyond its administrative life.
I build complex layered grounds because I’m chasing a balance between accident and intention. Beauty is not decoration for me; it’s a structural necessity. I want to speak about things that are heavy, complicated, painful. Beauty is how the work remains breathable.
Like muscle memory, Paper taught me that materials remember. When liquid touches paper, the fibres wrinkle as if trying to return to the tree or plants they once were. Grain has direction. Resistance has direction. Learning that changed how I approach surface. Gold and acrylic carry their own baggage – cultural, economic, symbolic – but I’m equally attentive to their physical behaviour. Listening happens through handling, through noticing when something feels forced.
Everyday materials arrive with prior lives. I don’t erase that history; I let it remain visible. A case in point is my use of deadstock sourced from Owino Market fabric vendors. In some works in this collection, the fabric remains visible before it becomes the foundation of the painting. The tension between fragility and endurance is where the conceptual depth sits. Materials remind me that identity is layered, repaired, worn, and constantly negotiated.
Pamela Enyonu is represented by Umoja Art Gallery
Pamela Enyonu: After Corner House (2026). Courtesy of the artist.