My name is Jonathan Sölanke Gathaara Fraser and I am a multidisciplinary artist based in Kenya working across various media as a means for paying careful (and especially caring) attention to my environment. Some of these modes of practice include drawing, printmaking, plant pressing, audio-visual work, and writing.

Across the various disciplines I pursue, I work to extend my attentiveness and care into the world around me. This attention has developed into an ongoing inquiry regarding relationships between alternating lenses through which we view the world; dream and consciousness, intuition and uncertainty, context and form.

My interest in generating a novel “image” has led to an artistic output that seeks to re-negotiate ideas of discipline, material and process to invite opportunities for interventions into and overlaps across established meaning/associations.

I work primarily through drawing to experience first-hand the laborious and delicate work required to think and feel through an idea so that the action of drawing is inextricable from the object of “a drawing”. My appreciation for the tactile process of creation leads me to an embodied space where the experience of something like drawing may take on additive meaning. Drawing as in “to pull in towards an axis” so as to possibly envelope into itself a wide and varied expression of a dynamic system.

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Fraser studied Fine Art at Kenyatta University and in 2023, was an artist in residence at 32º East, Uganda. In 2021, his solo exhibition There Is A Time and A Place was held at Circle Art Gallery. He has shown work in numerous group exhibitions in Nairobi. He is preparing for a forthcoming solo exhibition in Nairobi with Circle Art Gallery and a residency in Zurich facilitated by Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council.