Stories in Slabs

Peter Kenyanya Oendo is a married man with a proud and very public love affair. “Sometimes I do very little to a rock, I look at it and it already has a character of its own. You see, a rock has to seduce you, capture your imagination before you can create something out of it,” he says.

You guessed it. Or did you? Kenyanya is a sculptor. The self-taught artist hails from Kisii, a region famous for soapstone sculptures, and a lineage of skilled artisans. “My grandfather is in his late 90s and still sculpts. One uncle travelled the world collecting different sculptures and sketches he’d seen,” he says.

He’s always been fascinated by the world of rocks. Kenyanya regularly snuck away from high school during weekends to carve under a tree. But he could tell the difference between those who mass-produced and those who made one-of-a-kind creations. Naftali Momanyi was one such artisan. “I visited his stall many times and watched him make interesting one-offs. I learned a lot from him,” he says.

Kenyanya worked at Githima Arts Company for two years before moving to Nairobi to try his hand at making exclusive pieces of art with his cousin. In 2000, he decided to take the big plunge and turned to his jet-setting uncle Elkana Ongesa for assistance. Luckily, Ongesa had been in the process of organizing a group exhibition for Kisii sculptors at the then Grand Regency hotel. He added Kenyanya to the list and thus his life as a fully-fledged artist began. Aside from soapstone, Kenyanya works on other indigenous Kisii rocks such as graphite and basalt- two of the hardest rocks to carve.

A decade later, he has steadily honed his craft to the point where he gets international recognition. This July he was invited to speak at the 12th Changchung International Sculpture Symposium. “It will be a three-month stay and I hope to learn about different types of rocks and how to work with them,” he says.

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