A Kenyan adventure

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Student’s art gives voice to the impoverished

Sonja Larsen
Communications coordinator
Asian Aid Australia
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia

These paintings form part of Vanessa Reynolds’s Kisarro exhibition. Kisarro is Maasai for “rescuer.” Credit: Luke Fernandez.

Vanessa Reynolds is determined not to be silent.

The international poverty and development studies major at Avondale College of Higher Education spent a year volunteering in Kenya between 2009 and 2010. The African adventure continued on return to Australia with Vanessa putting brush to canvas to share not only her own experiences, but also those of the people who she met.

The abstract paintings form Vanessa’s first solo exhibition, Kisarro, which the Ground Up Espresso cafe in Carrington, Newcastle, has been hosting over the past month. Kisarro is Maasai for “rescuer.” The five-month project reflects Vanessa’s compassion for the marginalised and her desire to raise awareness of social justice.

One of the most popular paintings in the exhibition: Kibera Track, which uses the doors on a slum school to represent how education is one way out of poverty. “I want to provide opportunities for voices of poverty to be heard and to share the joy of the positive things happening in Kenya,” says Vanessa.