November 2025
In Between Stillness and Belonging
Sarah Muwanga
Solo Exhibition Programme
Sarah Wuwanga
Sarah Muwanga is a self-taught visual artist whose practice explores identity, belonging, and the quiet resilience found in everyday life.
Working primarily with oil and acrylic, she layers soft tones and textured brushwork to portray figures suspended between presence and detachment. Drawing from her mixed-race background,
Muwanga’s art reflects stories of connection, tenderness, and emotional strength, inviting viewers to see themselves in her subjects and to rediscover empathy through stillness.
Neglected notes
Oil Painting
Three siblings repurpose a kitchen hob as a makeshift recording studio. The pink pastel mimics children's chalk scribbles and realises what they are imagining. Blocks of plat paint interrupt their everyday realist, representing the gaps of care and attention from their hardworking but absent parents. The colour choices aim to capture how the children fulfil their unmet needs, through their solidarity, creativity
and imagination.
Her golden fingers through
Oil Painting
Illuminated by streaks of yellow oil pastel, the figure embodies both vulnerability and strength, reflecting connection and transcendence within shifting spaces.
The sun’s hum
Oil Painting
This piece aims to be a quiet portrait exploring stillness and inner rhythm, where soft tones and vibrant lines echo the tension between dissociation and resilience.
Nomad
Oil Painting
This piece captures a quiet moment of stillness. The figure is resting but not entirely at ease, slightly detached from her surroundings. The floral backdrop feels soft and almost dreamlike, but the outline holds her apart. It reflects that feeling of being present but slightly outside.
Then I rest
Oil Painting
She lies among blossoms, present yet distant. The blue outline shows her detachment from her surroundings. There’s strength in her stillness, but also uncertainty as she searches for her place in the world . The soft greens and warm floral tones contrast with the cool blue edges, while loose, layered brushstrokes hopefully create both texture and fragility.
JoinUs
No. 655
Oil Painting
This piece captures an intimate, fleeting moment of rest shared across generations. The warm tones and expressive brushwork aim to evoke a sense of everyday humanity and reflect on connection, care and the beauty of everyday life.
Sarah Muwanga is a self-taught visual artist whose practice explores themes of identity, culture, and the human experience. Working mainly in oil and acrylic, she uses texture and layering to create expressive pieces that invite reflection on belonging and self-expression. Drawing on her own mixed-race background, Muwanga’s work seeks to honour personal narratives while highlighting the shared connections between us.
When thinking about what she wants her audience to feel after looking at her art, Muwanga hopes they feel seen and understood; to encounter themselves in her figures and captured moments, and to recognise that, despite different backgrounds, our experiences often speak to one another.
Working primarily with oil and acrylic, she experiments with texture through palette knives and layered paint. By reworking the canvas until it feels lived in, she aims to replicate the atmosphere of a messy, warm, and inviting home—the kind where you can put your feet up on the sofa—a space that carries stories of strength, resilience, and growth.
Her practice explores the shared human experience of finding and growing into one’s identity, offering to others what she herself has sought along her own path as a mixed-race, self-taught artist.
More About Sarah Muwanga
For Sarah Muwanga, contemporary practice grows from tradition rather than against it. She treats classical techniques and motifs as “building blocks,” reframing them for present-day contexts. Handcraft lineages—weaving, printmaking, beadwork—and folk iconography repeatedly surface in her work, revealing how ancestral visual languages endure inside contemporary images.
As a self-taught artist, Muwanga names her biggest challenge the invisible rule that there is a “right” way to make art. Without classical schooling, she found the freedom to develop her own voice—by treating failure as research and using deliberate experimentation to unlearn habits. What most expands boundaries, in her view, is content and intention: centering stories that have rarely been foregrounded. Medium and method are the tools that serve that aim; textiles, found objects or digital processes can fold into painting when they clarify the story.
Audience reception, she observes, varies by expectation and time: traditional work is often quickly admired for recognisable skill, while experimental work asks for context and conversation. For artists this implies two tasks—be able to speak about the work and know how it should be shown.
She sees today’s borders between “traditional” and “contemporary” as productively blurred, enabling practices that resist labels and embrace play. Looking ahead, she expects technology and digital innovation to reshape the field—not to replace craft, but to widen who gets to speak and how knowledge is made. In short: intention leads, materials follow; tradition remains a living resource.
—— Sarah Muwanga