Brush Tu: Handle with Care

Brush Tu began as a partnership of three artists frustrated by the limitations of commercial mural work, initially forming a registered entity simply to meet practical needs like working and storage space. Over time, it evolved into a growing collective driven by a shared spirit of problem-solving and collaboration, expanding its membership and influence within the local art community.

Survival is not a passive state, but an active, exhausting performance. Whether navigating a landscape of vice, stretching our physical limits, or painting our faces to hide our exhaustion, we must perform to stay afloat.

In this exhibition, Boniface Maina, David Thuku, and Michael Musyoka each examine the fragile systems we abide by to exist within the world, reflecting on the contradictions between what is felt internally and what is presented outwardly. Across their practices, a shared thread emerges: the constant oscillation between vulnerability and control, self and environment, authenticity and performance.

Boniface Maina begins with the social and spiritual. The imagery of clouds and sunsets carries an initial softness, a sense of refuge. Yet beneath this dreamscape lies something more unsettling: the seven deadly sins, ever-present, tugging at the hem of those ascending. Perhaps a reminder that our ideals, however sincerely held, are never immune to corruption. A recurring motif of glass in the landscapes and portraits acts as both barrier and mirror, capturing the quiet performance required to navigate a world that often suppresses vulnerability.

David Thuku uses paper as both medium and metaphor, constructing intricate, layered works that mirror the complexity of human experience. His fragmented figures inhabit spaces that feel both comforting and strange, where ease is temporary and belonging is never fixed. The act of cutting, peeling, and rebuilding becomes a meditation on how identity is shaped and reshaped by the spaces we move through.

Michael Musyoka moves inward, to the psychological and moral realm. Through the recurring figure of the clown, he confronts the contradictions between inner truth and outward behaviour. His work exposes the porous boundary between virtue and vice, sincerity and performance, suggesting that identity itself can become a role shaped by the expectations of others. Here, survival is entangled with compromise, and the cost of belonging is measured against the erosion of self.

Together, the three artists map a continuum of human experience: from the social masks we wear, to the external spaces we inhabit and the internal negotiations that define who we are. Handle with Care invites viewers to consider the ways in which they navigate daily life. What protects us may also obscure us; what grounds us may also confine us. And within these shifting boundaries, survival becomes an act of constant adjustment and compromise.