By Shazia Nigar

My hands hover over an oval glass dome patiently covered by the artist, Naomi Van Rampelberg, in thousands of greenish-purple dots, like the wings of the Hadeda ibis. “You can touch it,” she says. I am immediately soothed by the repetitive, rhythmic curves running beneath my fingers. Surprised by the absence of a “no touching” policy, I ask her about it. “I had a blind client who bought a few of my pieces. He couldn’t see them, but he could touch them, and was thrilled to have art that he could enjoy,” she says. It is the texture that stands out.

We are in Naomi’s cosy Nairobi studio overlooking a patch of lawn brimming with plants. Here, Naomi works as a solitary artist, bent over glass, paper and wood, painting dots for hours—over weeks and sometimes months. She is never alone. The textured walls are plastered with postcards and cheerful images of Naomi with friends on safaris in Namibia and Tanzania, on beaches in Kenya and Mexico, and from trips across Europe.

Vases and bowls covered in thousands of dots line the shelves. There is rhythm, repetition and pattern. On paper, these patterns pulsate with energy. Some designs resemble topographic maps filled with colour, others the age rings on tree stumps. I think of the Indian painter S. H. Raza, who said, “The Bindu symbolises the seed, bearing the potential of all life.” The bindu—the dot—was the anchor point of his paintings for over forty years. His paintings centred a single large dot; Naomi works with millions of minute ones. I can’t help feeling they are reaching for the same thing.

Frank Whalley, a veteran art critic and journalist in Nairobi, reviewing Naomi’s 2023 exhibition Anxiety: My Muse, wrote: “At around 400 dots to the square centimetre a typical painting, at 42cm by 29cm (there were many that size), worked out at 487,200 dots, give or take a dot or two, depending on the design. Which leads me to wonder: How on earth does she make nearly half a million dots again and again without a blot, blob or stain?”

Born in Kenya in 1983 to self-taught artists—Belgian furniture designer Marc Van Rampelberg and Kenyan sculptor Chelenge Van Rampelberg—Naomi grew up with art. When her boarding school in France lost her portfolio of clay sculptures and drawings, she was unable to apply for art school and studied anthropology instead, a subject that helped her understand the world and her place in it. In Montreal, she began painting glass bottles as a hobby. Despite speaking English and French, with functional Flemish and Kiswahili, language could not help her access and express her feelings about personal and public events. The rhythmic movement of the dots—hours upon hours—grounded her. It soon became commissioned work and a vocation.

“I was angry for years that I couldn’t apply to art school, but over time I’m grateful I didn’t end up in a formal programme. It would have squeezed my creativity and replaced it with rigid rules,” Naomi says. She cites no conscious influences and keeps a distance from market aesthetics. When I mention that her work recalls Kenyan beadwork, she points to Australian Aboriginal dot art. The similarity in patterns and rounded movements is evident, but it was not a conscious influence. Carol Lees, Director and Curator of One Off Gallery—where Naomi’s work opens this month—says, “Naomi has a very broad client base spanning all cultures and races. As with all the best art, everyone knows what they are seeing is good art. They need no formal training. Not everyone will like it equally, but no one will dispute that it’s good art. I think her work exists in collections all over the world and at home.”

During the pandemic, when her preferred glass paint went out of production, Naomi turned to paper. Until then, intimidated by a blank surface, she had largely avoided it apart from making collages. As we move through the studio, Frida Kahlo motifs recur: a pair of shoes bearing an image of Kahlo with her pet monkey hangs on the wall—too small for Naomi to wear—and a postcard shaped like Frida’s Mexican dress. We reach an area where huge canvases lean against the walls. Some are works her family has collected; others are from her latest collection, KIND•HUMAN (Mixed media Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures), to be exhibited at One Off Contemporary Gallery, opening 25 October 2025.

She lifts cotton towels from a 122 × 130 cm canvas to reveal ‘Kwibuka, They Walk Among Us’ (Pen on Paper)—a dotted purple sky, dense in parts with deeper shades of cloud. Along the bottom, white silhouettes with thin black borders stand shoulder to shoulder, like too many people in an overflowing matatu. A decade after running a studio and art shop in Kigali for four years, Naomi made this piece in honour of Kwibuka—“to remember” in Kinyarwanda—the annual commemoration of more than a million Rwandans who died in the hundred days of the Genocide against the Tutsi in 1994. Purple and white are the primary colours of remembrance. “Though this piece—unlike most of my work, which is abstract—is about a specific event, it is open to interpretation like most of my work,” she says. “The white silhouettes act as containers of projection—are they spirits of those who were killed, or repositories of the génocidaires, the evil that still lingers?”

In ‘Our Collective Resonance’ (154 × 184 cm — Pen on Paper), six characters appear repeatedly, merging as a collective yet standing out as individuals each time. The silhouettes are patterned and coloured meticulously. This tension between the collective and the individual is Naomi’s interpretation of the “six degrees of separation” that binds us in the digital age. The painting is accompanied by life-size wooden sculptures placed before mirrors—an invitation to immerse ourselves in that tension. As Lees says, “Naomi’s work speaks to both the emotions and the mind—it has a significant cerebral content whilst still eliciting an emotional response.”

Van Rampelberg’s work allows us to project our stories and emotions onto the abstract patterns, shapes, colours and movements she creates. Her dotted designs act as vessels that hold—and perhaps transmute—our projections and, in turn, us.

Shazia Nigar is a writer interested in culture, environment and politics. She is trained in Cultural Studies and Social Anthropology.