Ugandan artist Irene Piloya is holding her debut solo exhibition titled Between the Trees at the Latitude 0º Kampala hotel. This immersive seven-week long exhibition invites audiences into a deeply personal yet universally resonant exploration of memory, nature, and transformation.
Working with barkcloth and plant fibres, Piloya fuses material experimentation with psychological inquiry. Her body of work comprises large scale garden installations and intimate biographical prints, all of which interact with their surroundings, shaped by the wind, sunlight, and time itself.
At the heart of Between the Trees is a process driven by both science and symbolism. The artist interrogates the fragility and malleability of memory, its ability to fade, mutate, and persist.
By creating the conditions for the environment to interact with the works, reactions continue even within the exhibition space, allowing viewers to witness these changes in real time.
Organised by Borderlands Art, the exhibition that opened on September 12, and closes on November 2, engages ideas of neuroplasticity, questioning how environmental stimuli and internal rewiring can reshape how we understand home, self, and history.
On display are 61 silkscreen prints on kyenkyen textile under the title Yesterday Is Gone. This collection re-imagines Piloya’s home in Gulu and Kumasi in the same frame. Depictions of domestic and familiar spaces unite a biographical journey nurtured by two ecosystems.
The portraits document the process of making kyenkyen barkcloth paper as a biographical text, paying attention to the daily lives of people living between the trees. Intergenerational knowledge, labour, and caring practices in Uganda and Ghana are archived through this series. Womb I, and Womb II, both made of dawadawa textile, are site-responsive installations responding to both a physical site and a vessel for memory.
These sculptural forms represent birth, after various processes such as harvesting, beating, boiling, dying. The placenta and artwork construct an architectural ghost woven from the disembodied elements of tree bark. They are a homage to the bond shared between generations.
The Daa (Grandmother) kyenkyen textile works, Raw, Sister, and Daughter, evoke the personal experiences of displacement. Fibres trace the complicated effects such experiences have on memory and history. The textiles tell of nights sheltering under trees, sleeping on grandmother’s fabrics. Like those moments in the bush, the installations posit that memory is not a thing we recall, but a space we momentarily inhabit. It makes the invisible architecture of the past momentarily tangible, suggesting that every space is a repository, haunted by the echoes of its former configurations and the lives that passed through it.
In an attempt to revive forgotten memories, the series Between the Trees, and Fragility made of kyenkyen textile embarks on a journey to explore how trees can be symbolic spaces to create a feeling of belonging. Manipulating the fibres of the Ghanaian kyenkyen marks time, location, and climate. Like human biographies, the trees tell a story that is not fixed but continually unfolding.
Permission, 2025, is a lubugo textile with sodium hypochlorite paint. Being uprooted reconfigures the social and environmental landscape. It challenges the mind and the integrity of the soil. Counteracting the idea that the mind protects itself by banishing moments of trauma – this work shows the present absence. Inducing a deconstruction of the fabric shows the material capacity of the bark cloth. As the fabric transforms – black to brown – it becomes a metaphor for our own neuroplasticity in turbulent times.
Beyond Transparency, 2025, is an installation of 23 glass jars, sodium hypochlorite dissolved plant fibres, and ropes. It is a metaphorical representation of how the mind restructures itself when exposed to familiar spaces or objects. This is an enquiry into the strengthening or weakening of neural pathways, which can ultimately affect behaviour, thought, and emotions. These effects are influenced by variables such as the concentration of bleach, the temperature of water, the varying amounts of each in every container and the tree bark material. There are transformations occurring in response to external stimuli that are exciting to experience.
‘The processes for making these fabrics, harvesting, boiling, beating and pressing, was learned in the Hemag Forest of Kumasi, Ghana. Throughout that time, Piloya was connected to the biographies of land, challenged by urban growth. While creating the works provokes memories of her own, she recalled experiences from her origins in northern Uganda. Facing times of war, her grandmother would lay down a kikoyi for them to sleep on in the bushes whenever they were running from the rebels. This fabric carried safety and inspired a material canvas for Piloya to narrate parallel stories, between land and life,’ a statement reveals.
‘In a bid to express these memories of familiar spaces, the tree bark is a symbol of protection and perseverance. Like humans, trees also undergo transplant shocks. The wind, sunlight, and decay add another layer of temporality, raising questions about what preservation truly means when time, nature, and memory are all in flux,’ it adds.
The statement further says certain artworks use chemical reactions as a gesture of how humans and nature respond to rupture and displacement. Our brains are constantly adapting to new experiences and environments, and this can affect the way we locate ourselves.
Asked to explain why each hanging textile has a story, holds a memory or preserves a disappearing truth, Piloya responded: ‘To me as an artist, I find it very important to preserve memories of the past and the best way I could document them was through creating these artworks that act as metaphors of the past. Having these layers of information hidden within the works as narratives is also my own way of telling a story of the past.’
On why she has concentrated on the fabrics of the three trees of kyenkyen, dawadawa and mutuba, Piloya replied: ‘I found it quite interesting that all the three types of trees belong to the category of barkcloth, a traditional and ancient textile art from native of Africa particularly in regions like Ghana and Uganda.
All the fabrics made are derived from the inner bark of these trees; kyenkyen from the Antiaris toxicaria tree in Ghana, dawadawa from the Parkia biglobosa tree in Ghana and mutuba from the Ficus natalensis (wild fig) tree in Uganda. They are natural, renewable, and biodegradable textiles.’
As to how these three trees are connected, Piloya said: ‘All the fabrics created from these trees undergo the same technique of creation and in this case, I used the knowledge from Uganda by the locals when making the barkcloth to revive the long forgotten heritage of making kyenkyen fabric from Ghana.’
She added: ‘These are not ordinary everyday fabrics; they hold deep cultural, spiritual, and ceremonial importance within their communities of origin. They are used in rituals, royal functions, festivals, and as burial shrouds for important figures, which was the same case in Ghana.’