By Anna Seaman
For Maggie Otieno, materials are alive and, crucially, materials have memory. The Nairobi-based sculptor works mostly with found materials that she says have a way of finding their way to her. Although she began her career in painting, she transitioned into sculpture in 1999, and a pivotal moment came in 2017 when a collector offered her access to his yard full of reclaimed railway sleepers from India. He thought she would understand how to work with them.
“At that time in my practice I wasn’t working with old and distressed wood but this collector – Mr Chandu Dodhia – said he thought I could do it justice, that I could feel it and speak to it,” said Otieno.
And he was right. Otieno, at first entranced by the texture and grain of the old Indian teak, began researching its history once the wood was back in her studio. Over the coming months and years, the sleepers became a language for her, telling stories of labour, history and migration.
In 2022, when a museum in Kenya approached her to work with sleepers from the country’s own railways, another layer of history emerged. The Kenya–Uganda railway had been constructed under British colonial rule, largely by thousands of labourers brought from India in the late nineteenth century. The connection between the two countries, already present in the materials she had been working with, now became part of her own artistic exploration.
“As a sculptor I am a person who is building and safeguarding memory, telling people stories with a material that most of us have forgotten. I wanted to create figures to be custodians of those stories,” she said.
It is these anthropomorphic figures that populate her current exhibition, Sojourner: The Difference is the Same, at Efie Gallery in Dubai until November 13. Her first solo exhibition with the Dubai gallery, it brings together works constructed mostly from sections of railway sleepers, held together by joinery bolts to form human-like figures. Their heads bear no features and yet seem to speak to the viewer — somehow expression-filled while retaining a blankness, as though that emptiness is filled instead by the memories they hold.
The works bear titles in Swahili and English. Chachu Tamu (Bitter Sweet) is made from a single sleeper that split in half and almost disintegrated when Otieno cut it. Standing at almost two metres tall, its head slightly inclined, the wood is held together by bolts, while one side retains a jagged, broken edge. Even without knowing its full story, the sleeper’s previous life remains palpable; the sense that it has borne witness to many things seems to seep through the old wood. For Otieno, this comes from allowing the material to remain as she finds it.
“The splits, the cracks, the burrows made by termites, I find all the marks so beautiful and I do not try to fix them. The material wants the marks to be celebrated, not to be removed, manipulated or changed.
“This particular work, Chachu Tamu, is about the journey of life: when something happens to disrupt your peace and you start crumbling, but after some time you realise those challenges make you stronger and that bitter pain becomes a sweet pain,” she said.
In Msikilizaji (The Listener), the wood is darker and the angle of the figure different. It seems to carry another strand of the story, although which one Otieno leaves unspecified. Elsewhere, works hang on the walls, appearing to peer down from the gallery’s high ceiling or listen in over a dividing wall. Their presence demands attention, their narratives taking on new resonance as they reach new audiences.
The figures form part of Sojourners, an ongoing series Otieno began in 2022. The title refers not only to the journeys made by the railway sleepers themselves, but to a larger idea that runs through her practice: that materials, like people, travel, accumulating histories and meanings as they move.
“I simply love distressed and discarded material. Every time I come across a new piece, I hold it in my hand and try to imagine its journey and how it arrived in my studio. We think humans are the ones that travel, but material travels too. Sojourners is about how much material travels and what its story becomes depending on who gets hold of it. When the artworks go on display in the gallery or to a collector, their journeys are not over; another phase of their life is beginning.”
The only work in the exhibition not constructed from railway sleepers is Wasafiri Majini, which she translates to English as Sea Journer. It was made during a residency in Ghana, where Otieno worked in the studio of Professor El Anatsui. On a quest for found material, she visited a nearby fishing harbour and returned with both stories and worn-out rowing paddles collected from local fishermen. Confused as to why she wanted their old tools rather than new ones, she explained that she wanted the wood that bore the marks of their journeys — their sweat, their pulse.
Yet the resulting sculpture remains headless because this is a story Otieno feels she can only imagine. “The story of the railway sleepers is also partly the story of our independence in Kenya,” she explains. “But with this work, I was in a foreign land and didn’t feel I could be in touch with the story enough to put a head on the figure. It had to remain as mysterious to me as the story of the person who owned the wood.”
That distinction is important. For Otieno, listening to what a material carries does not give her licence to speak for it. Where its history is intimately connected to her own, she can give it a face; where that connection is absent, she allows something to remain unknowable. Yet in both cases, her purpose is to draw the viewer closer: to question where these materials have been, whose lives have touched them and what histories might remain embedded within them.
Research and writing for this article were supported by Efiɛ Gallery, with editorial independence maintained throughout.
Sojourner: The Difference is the Same. Maggie Otieno
Efie Gallery, Dubai, UAE
23/09/2026 – 13/11/2026
Maggie Otieno (b. 1974, Kenya) is a Nairobi-based sculptor whose practice explores memory, identity and the histories carried by materials. Beginning her career as a painter, she transitioned to sculpture in 1999 and is particularly known for her anthropomorphic figures constructed from reclaimed railway sleepers. Her work investigates the relationship between material, human experience and collective memory, drawing on the physical traces left by time, labour and movement. In 2023, her work featured in the Sharjah Architecture Triennial as part of Cave_bureau’s Anthropocene Museum 9.0. More recently, a residency at the studio of Ghanaian artist El Anatsui expanded her exploration of found materials to include discarded wooden fishing paddles.
N. October 17, 2026
