The ON WAX global art laboratory is an art based experiment open to a global community from a diversity of backgrounds willing to explore themes of exchange and gift versus exploitation and appropriation through artistic expression. In this container, viewers and creators are invited to question perspectives and perceptions —both individually and collectively—and engage in meaningful inquiry through artistic expression. 

A  common library of motifs extracted from African Wax prints and traditional African weaving patterns will serve as raw artistic material to explore themes of cultural appropriation and cultural hybridization in global culture. While weaving patterns symbolize a common language across global human cultures, the complex history of African Wax prints reflects simultaneously colonial exploitation, cultural hybridization and African cultural resilience. The ON WAX research project seeks to ignite artistic explorations that address the entangled dynamics between global North and global South and our intricate relationships with the human and non-human world. The project is part of an art based doctorate research on the practice of deconstruction and hybridization as catalysts in the artistic process and how they foster shifts in perception.

Participants joining the GLOBAL ON WAX ART LABORATORY will create and share collages, assemblages, poems, and stories, drawing from the common library of visual elements of the ON WAX project and incorporating their own personal imagery. During this collective experiment participants will be guided to directly experience hands-on artistic deconstruction and hybridization to disturb their own perceptions, while co-creating together a tapestry of multiple voices that will expand collective perceptions.

In expressive art practice we embrace the creative process as a dance between not knowing and knowing, between getting lost and finding our way. Art making starts with the intuitive call of our aesthetic attractors /medium /artistic modalities, not knowing yet where they will lead us, trusting that as we attend them diligently and embrace possible confusion and chaos, at some point coherence and meaning will emerge (William Kentridge 2024). Through my years of experimentation with the creative process as an artist and a guide, I remain in awe of how the hands themselves, the body, these parts of us that are not directly conscious, can access a different kind of knowing that emerges when we truly embrace “not-knowing” in art-making. Opening up to what we may find when getting lost is what we will explore in these collective experiments. This is the concept of poiesis—“knowing through making”—central to expressive arts. 

How to participate

• Send an email specifying that you wish to join the up coming GLOBAL ON WAX ART LABORATORY.
• You will receive an answer with more information and a short questionnaire to fill up and send back.
• You will also receive a set of motifs from the ON WAX library of motifs & patterns. The set will be send to you via email in the form of a pdf that you will need to print to join the lab.
• You will also need to prepare some personal imagery to combine with your set. The details will be send to you when you register.
• The basic art materials you will need are: A4 white papers, pens, scissors, glue. 
• Not special skills are necessary other than you honest commitment to engage in the process. The participation is free, this our art gift exchange.
• You will be informed as soon as the next Lab date is fixed.