In the painting, the farmer’s daughter decides to forget, relying instead on her dreams and fantasies beyond the real world. The shrubs that grow around her and through the silk fabric underneath her are symbolic of time spent, of the time she has taken to reach the state of total relaxation we see here. The figure casts off any pressure to remain modest and composed, refusing to assimilate with her role or to remember that she is the farmer’s daughter. The subject of Abe’s painting feels distinctly rebellious.
I am still searching for those points in my memory.” I don’t remember when she dropped the hoe and chose to dream instead. I watched my mother live through that fear, but the point at which she stopped fearing and started flourishing is a blur to me. The artist describes her own relationship to this process of remembering, understanding it as something born from anxiety inducing fear: “I lived in fear of the future, maybe because I am a farmer’s daughter with nothing to rely on but my own will power to break out of certain conditions and flourish on my own terms. Through this process of remembering where you are, you are reminded of where you strive to be: “anywhere but here”, Abe states. Any child raised in these modest backgrounds is taught to empathise with and accept their own position, while always remembering where they have come from and where they will lay their head at the end of the day. In Uganda, rural areas are populated by subsistence farmers living in humble homes.
The title of the work is inspired by humble beginnings. The artist visualises her mother’s struggle as she fought to be an adult while still a child, thinking about school while trying to look for a job. Through the process of creating the work, Abe envisions what life would have been like for her mother, who had her as a teenager. The painting is reminiscent of the artist’s adolescence while simultaneously reimagining an image of Abe’s mother as a teenager. The Farmer’s Daughter (2022) is from Abe’s latest solo exhibition, Shrub-let of Old Ayivu.
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