As a student of Jewelry Design at Goldsmith in London in the 1980s, Sanaa Gateja made an unexpected discovery in the form of a ring he found beautiful -that was made during the Second World from paper beads. When he returned to Uganda in 1990, he developed this idea into social work, sharing the method with women and youth in various fragilized communities and in refugee camps across East Africa- to support them in developing local handicraft economies from used, discarded paper.

The collaborative rolling of recycled paper from newspapers, booklets and magazines into hundreds of paper conical beads is also at the core of Gateja’s own artistic work. The beads are dyed, then stitched on barkcloth - a textile with sacred connotations which is still made in a traditional way from the bark of a local ficus.

Cutting across still life, portraiture or abstraction, the haptic, and vibrant ‘tapestries’ hence produced, point out to East African cultural and spiritual heritage, the vernacular, and agricultural values. When one gets closer to the tapestry, the broken letters of the original paper charge the work as if with a mysterious language to decrypt, or suggest the constant, scattered information we are subjected to –that remains at the

back of our consciousness.

In recent years Gateja’ s work has been commenting regularly on the destruction of the environment in Uganda, due to climate change, forest logging and agricultural mismanagement.