Chelenge Van Rampelberg

Biography

Chelenge Van Rampelberg carved her first sculpture from an avocado tree that had fallen outside her house. She took it up to relieve stress. The piece is called “My Mum and I” and, as of 2024, is held by the Nairobi Contemporary Arts Institute.

She was born in 1961 and grew up in the rural community of Kericho in the Rift Valley. Wood was part of everyday life: firewood was gathered in the forests near the house, and her acquaintance with cutting wood began in childhood. After finishing school, in the early 1980s, she married the French artist and furniture designer Marc Van Rampelberg. Later she had free time and decided to devote it to art. She began with painting but hid her work. Her husband, after seeing the pictures, urged her to show them, and her first exhibition took place in 1985. Her oil paintings are mostly narrative, drawing on stories and images from her childhood. She received no formal art education until the early 1990s. Then she attended a two-week workshop on etching and woodcut printing at the Alliance Française in Nairobi, and later took courses there, at Gallery Watatu and at the Ngecha Artist Association.

Carving began with the fallen avocado tree. Within three months she had made three pieces she liked, and she went on experimenting. Her sculptures are semi-abstract. As one description puts it, they centre on women, their place in society, black beauty and gender inequality; there are religious subjects too. In 1996 she carved “Adam and Eve”, two figures in ebony. She is called Kenya’s first female sculptor; how strictly that claim holds is hard to check, and I would treat it as an established description rather than a settled fact.

In 2013 she was one of six artists in an exhibition at the Nairobi National Museum marking fifty years of Kenyan independence. That same year she had a solo exhibition at the One Off gallery in Rosslyn, near Nairobi, and the Sankara Hotel in Westlands bought several of her sculptures. In 2014 she was artist in residence at the Lamu Painters Festival.

In 2020 she was included in a German exhibition built around the work of Michael Armitage. In 2021 the exhibition was shown in London, at the Royal Academy of Arts. In 2022 it moved to Nairobi under the title “Mwili, Akili na Roho” and was expanded with works by three more artists. In 2023 two of her sculptures were shown in an Alliance Française exhibition devoted to Kenyan women artists. In 2024 a retrospective was held at the Nairobi Contemporary Arts Institute.

Her studio is in Tuala, in Ongata Rongai, not far from the southern part of Nairobi National Park.