Stacey Gillian Abe

Stacey Gillian Abe (b. 1991 in Kampala, Uganda) graduated from Kyambogo University, Kampala, with a BA in Art and Industrial Design.

Abe is a Ugandan contemporary artist whose practice includes photography, sculpture, installation, performance, and painting. By drawing from past experiences and using her autobiography to highlight the strengths and fragilities of the female mind, her work references identity, gender, spirituality, and cultural mysticism by criticizing stereotypical depictions of black women. Each space that Gillian works in has its particular context and receives its own interpretation; highlighting self-resilience and that which can be overcome.

The stereotypes she addresses in her work materialize into imagined spaces that instigate a surreal mystical feel borne of two realms, contrasting and complementing each other.   The artist incorporates a metaphorical and experimental approach to her work through her interest in exploring new techniques with parallel mediums like glass and ceramics, fibers, textures, and photography. Her work draws attention to the hand-made through the method of tying together and binding, stitching, clustering, and pairing which are assembled and layered into a metaphorical concept.  

She has received numerous awards, and, in 2018, the artist was listed among the Forbes Africa 30 under 30 Creatives. The artist has held various artist residencies among them Urbane Künste, Dortmund (2019) and Fondation Blachère, Apt (2018).  Her work has been exhibited in both Africa and abroad, at Nairobi Museum, Nairobi; Institut Francais Kinshasha, Kinshasa; Goethe institute, Nairobi and the 12th Dakar Biennale, Dakar, among others. In 2020, she participated at the 2020 Stellenbosch Trienniale, Cape Town. She lives and works in Kampala, UG.

"My concepts are more or less birthed from a personal context and then blown out of proportion, shrunk, distorted or disintegrated from which possible meaning and interpretations are shifted… I personally believe we are spiritual beings and that there exists no hard and fast distinction between the spiritual and physical (or material) world and a life oriented towards an inner being." – Stacey Gillian Abe