Sending My Love To You, Baby

7 November - 14 December

Haricot Gallery is delighted to present Sending My Love To You, Baby, a joint exhibition between artists and friends Bernice Mulenga and Joy Yamusangie.

The title for the exhibition, a joint decision from the pair, emits an assured certainty, a declaration of love with clear intention. It implies a love that you already know exists, but in this specific moment is being directed to you, Baby. Though the “you’s” in question are varied for both artists, as familial, romantic and friend based relationships are featured, throughout each work is a tenderness that is beautifully expressed across mediums.

Drawing from the temporal notion of “sending” love, in the works we face the action of love and touch on the idea of it being ongoing, continuously rippling as it is extended and finds new forms. Through their photographs, Mulenga offers a glimpse into the kinship with their younger sister and cousins. As the series forms partially around grief within their family, there is a call inward amongst each of them to send love, to reiterate its existence. A small act of defiance to the consuming nature of grief.

In Joy’s paintings we meet the uncertainty of navigating the medium through which love is sent. The works look at the complexities of how and when romantic love is expressed, and its transformative nature as it reaches new forms. Birds and birdlike figures reappear, both as messengers and to symbolise transitions.

Within Sending My Love To You, Baby Mulenga and Yamusangie offer a message, an action, a gliding movement of impermanence but ultimately and always, of love.

Words by Ellen Morrison