Paper Café is pleased to present Quilting Light, a cyanotype exhibition by Nairobi-based artist Elizabeth Ashamu Deng.

In this body of work, Elizabeth pushes cyanotype beyond a single process. She uses toning to shift its characteristic blues into browns, draws on photographic, hand-drawn, and contact-print methods, and sometimes adds gold pen, gold leaf, watercolor, and stitching to create richly textured compositions.

The exhibition is inspired by the rhythm, repetition, and piecing of quilting. Some works are quilts in a literal sense: cyanotype prints cut, pieced, and stitched together. Others evoke quilted surfaces through layered paper cut-outs and botanical silhouettes, using light to create and connect shapes. The compositions are orderly yet unsettling, drawing the viewer into a state of disoriented peace, where forms shift slowly and invite sustained contemplation.

The works bring together Elizabeth’s love of African textiles, her reverence for the natural world, and her dual heritage, drawing especially on African American quilting traditions and Nigerian adire patterns.

🗓️ Exhibit runs 28 May-1 June. Free entry, open Tuesday-Friday 8am to 4pm and Saturday 8am to 8pm

📍 The Good Grain, AK119, Westlands

Exhibit catalogue available here.