A duo exhibition titled Sovereign Waters by Sebawali Sio and Robert Mung’are explored water, memory, identity, and resilience through paintings and sculptures.
It was curated by Sebawali Sio.
The exhibition, which ran from August 5 to 13 at the Textured Art Gallery, Blue Moon Shopping Centre in Watamu, showcased 28 paintings and three sculptures by Sio, and eight sculptures by Mung’are.
While they work across different materials and processes, their practices converge around themes of resilience, vulnerability, transformation, and identity.
Sio says that she explores water as a form of intelligence running through the paintings, sculptures and the creative process. It grew out of years of watching water carve, hold, and purify.
“It has been the constant in my practice for years, and it felt like time to let it take up the whole room rather than share space with other subjects,” she says.
The paintings were created using Indian ink and granulating watercolours. She started with salt dissolution, then what the paintings would be about, and later water as a subject.
The salt-dissolution technique is a technique where sea salt is applied to wet pigment. It allows the pigment to spread and settle in unpredictable patterns, giving the water and materials a degree of control over the final image.
“I chose it because it mirrors exactly what I want to say about water, that it shapes without force, and that beauty can come from surrender rather than control,” she says.
Her paintings show sea, horses, female figures, and trees. Some figures are suspended or only partially formed to depict movement between presence and disappearance.
She explains that it’s because that’s closer to the truth of how we exist inside something as vast and fluid as water. We are never fully separate from it, never fully dissolved either. The incompleteness is the point.
“Water is doing the actual painting, in a sense. The way the pigment blooms, spreads, and settles is dictated by water's behaviour, not mine. My role is closer to a collaborator than an author,” she says.
She explains that water connects to ideas of femininity and the body since they both carry cycles, tides, and memory. They are also underestimated in their power. She sees the body, particularly the feminine body, as another site where water’s logic plays out.
Sio says that the horses represent movement, instinct and untamed grace that she feels water is like, while the human figures represent the self-moving through and sometimes being moved by forces. Her research into natural water purification has influenced how she thinks about resilience, patience and renewal in her life.
A sculpture titled The Ocean Remembers Her Daughters is a female body made from cowrie shells, gypsum and resin. She explains that it explores lineage: the way the sea keeps a record of everything that's passed through it, including the women who came before us.
“The piece means that nothing is truly lost to water, that the women who came before us, their resilience and their labour, are held somewhere in the tide, even when history forgets to record them,” she says.
She uses gypsum, resin, fibreglass, wood, plaster of Paris, glass, ink and watercolour, with every material retaining its own character. She says that cowrie shells carry their history of trade, adornment, femininity, and the ocean's slow accumulation of memory. Using them felt like building the sculpture out of memory rather than just representing it.
It was important for her to include sculpture in this exhibition because water isn’t only fluid; it also carves, hardens, and holds form, like coral or stone.
She views water not simply as an aesthetic subject but as an ecological system with purification processes, a role in sustaining life and a vulnerability to disruption.
“Sovereign Waters is about water answering to no one, moving, shaping, and renewing on its own terms. That sovereignty felt like the right lens for this whole body of work,” she says.
The exhibition marks a transition in Sio’s practice. In September, she will begin an MA in Art & Ecology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she plans to deepen the research and material inquiry explored through the exhibition.
Mung’are’s sculptural practice begins with an internal armature shaped using plasticine or plaster, followed by mould-making and casting in fibreglass and resin. He finishes the sculptures with faux patina to give them an aged appearance.
His masks explore dualities including resilience and vulnerability, surface and depth, influence and individuality, and silence and dialogue. Textures and eroded fragments show the endurance of materials and the fragility of memory.
“Water represents a state of flow and a way of being yourself and living without societal expectations. I show this by exploring different techniques and materials like fibreglass,” he says.
He uses fibreglass since it’s lighter than wood, stone and steel, while it’s also durable, waterproof and suitable for indoor and outdoor use, and the faces represent emotion and identity.
His work titled Eye of Memory is a mask sculpture with a single eye to represent changing ideas of truth and memory. Another piece, Withered Vision, uses a rough, weathered surface to evoke age, endurance and erosion. Veil of Symbols shows spirals and geometric carvings that resemble ancient codes.
Mung’are credits the persistence, dedication and creativity of sculptors Sebawali Sio, Kevin Oduor and Meshack Oiro, as an important influence on his practice. His works in the exhibition are a tribute to the sculptors and creative community that shaped his journey.
“I create a sense of endurance and fragility, while erosion represents fading memories and personalities changed by societal pressures. Water’s ability to change surfaces over time represents the way human beings and their identities are shaped by experience and memory,” he says.
He invites viewers to reflect on identity and resist societal pressure. He hopes audiences leave the exhibition with a sense of acceptance and reflection, while being connected to their original identities.
Sio hopes viewers felt the sense of water’s intelligence and sovereignty, and how entangled we already are with it, whether we notice or not. She further hopes it encouraged them to reconsider their relationship with water.
“We treat it as infinite and endlessly forgiving, when it’s actually finite, easily disrupted, and holds the consequences of how we treat it for far longer than we imagine,” she says.