Busia youths discover mosaic art of grass

Busia, Kenya: A group of young innovators in Busia County are leaving their mark in art by creating beautiful masterpieces using grass.

Using carefully cut grass stems, the youths from Zinduka Youth Bunge in Nambale Constituency make shapely forms that they then place on dark canvasses to create mosaics, which they sell for a handsome price.

Godfrey Boss, the president of the youth group, says its 30 members came together with different ideas for engaging their talents for economic gains.

After discussions they settled on mosaic art, poultry farming, table banking, shoe crafting, graphic design and painting.

“When we were forming the group, we sat down and identified the talents each of us had. We mobilised othe few resources we had to come up with a plan of activities,” says Boss, whose group was started in the 2011, and registered as a small business enterprise.

Their flagship innovation is the mosaic art made out of grass.

Tito Okello, a 60-year-old village elder from Lubanga village in Matungu, says the grass has been used for thatching houses for many years, and no one ever thought it would churn out beautiful items.

“This grass does not grow just anywhere. If you have it in your farm, you are lucky since you can sell it to builders and make money. In fact, the only other use we knew is making ropes and brooms,” says Okello.

Growing up in the village, therefore, gave the youths ideas on how to make good use of the grass, which has a tough stem and grows to about a metre in length.

The ingenuity of their craftsmanship stems out of the ability to fashion different kinds of items using locally available materials - the grass they use as the marquee raw material is locally available in parts of Western and Nyanza region. Other materials include bamboo, banana fibers and egg shells.

“The first step is to harvest the grass manually from farms. We then divide it into different piles containing dried and relatively greener grass,” says Boss.

This stage where sorting takes place enables them to work with the various natural colours the grasses have, depending on their level of maturity at harvest.

Further sorting is done to have different piles of thin and thick varieties of the grass, which are then split right down the middle along the cylindrical cross-section of the stems.

The painstaking procedure is completely done by hand, and since it is not a one-man job, each member of the team is assigned a specific task.

While the preparation of grass goes on, another group sketches the portrait to be developed.The next stage is cutting the grass to fit into the outline created by the portrait.

It is then transferred onto the canvas, which is always pitch black. Erick Emilio, the chairman of the group notes that colour black is preferred for the background of the mosaic art because it gives the best contrast.

“There are many options clients have for framing their art pieces. We can do a rugged wood frame from tree bark or a client can independently frame their product. Ultimately the choice of frame is normally left to the client,” says Emilio.

The group’s art has been cast on the national limelight several times during big exhibitions but none comes close to the adulation it received after two of its pieces were presented to President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy William Ruto earlier this year — portraits of the two leaders whose images were entirely made from grass, with a black velvet surface for the background.

“The art never fetches the same price because we look at each concept as an original work. We also use our numbers to ensure that the work is done on time since it is a labour intensive exercise to come up with just a single piece of art. The two we gave the president and his deputy took us a month to create,” said Maurine Matanji, the secretary of the group.

The group sells up to four pieces of their work each week for at least Sh2,500. The group has displayed its work at various forums in western.