Janet Mbirimi - WARREN EDITIONS

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Janet Mbirimi, born in 1987 in Zimbabwe, grew up in a village in the Hwedza region (a district in the province of Mashonaland East).

Janet Mbirimi’s art reflects her deep-rooted connection to her childhood landscape. Her geographic landscape has become inextricably linked to her landscape of memories. This profound connection, coupled with her exposure and intense involvement in printmaking at Warren Editions, has led her to explore her own unique ‘language’ in etchings, woodcuts, and monotypes, a testament to the power of art to evoke nostalgia and appreciation.

Her etching Mtukwa is of the mountainous range in the province of Mashonaland East. In the summer months, as a child, she would walk on the gravel road with her older sister, Florence, to Mtukwa, about two hours away from their home; there, they would primarily pick plum sugar fruit – in Shona, named ‘mazhanje’.

Mountains serve as places of solace for the artist. In the tumultuous political period of the mid-2000s leading up to the 2008 national elections, the Zanu PF (Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front) military would go around her village to terrorise the inhabitants. During these violent times, she and her younger sister would escape to find refuge in the nearby mountain until her brother would come to fetch them after the military left the area. Her many monotypes of the mountainous regions in the Cape show this appreciation of the hills.

Her oil and watercolour monotypes depict hills in many iterations. Monotype was commonly referred to as the ‘painterly print’. A monotype is solely generated from autonomous marks on a surface. The monotype contains no ‘re-usable’ elements. In other words, in creating a monotype, the surface an artist paints does not hold any fixed information that can be printed more than once. Unlike the printing surface of an etching, which has been permanently etched and thus can be printed in an edition, the monotype exists as a once-off – a unique print.

Mbirimi’s prints have been shown alongside other printmakers and South African artists in many group exhibitions.

She lives in Cape Town with her two daughters, son and husband.