Surrealism’s history is often told through a familiar canon: André Breton, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst. Emerging in the aftermath of the First World War, the movement challenged the authority of reason and sought access to forms of experience beyond conscious control.

Among the concepts that would later illuminate Surrealism’s exploration of the unfamiliar, few proved as influential as the uncanny. In his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, Freud examined a particular form of unease — not the encounter with what is entirely foreign or unknown, but the return of what we know too well in a form we can no longer fully recognize, unsettling the certainty with which we thought we understood it.

The visual language of Uncanny Nature, presented by The Bridge Gallery, naturally invites a conversation with Surrealism: bodies shifting, interiors resisting ordinary logic, memory folding into dreams. Yet the significance of this dialogue extends beyond visual development, toward a shared inquiry: what happens when the visible is no longer enough to contain reality?

Méné’s encounter with rock art is not a mere search backward for a primitive origin. What he discovers is a visual language in which the human figure is not separated from its environment, where the boundary between human, animal, and spiritual forms remains porous. Méné’s practice is shaped by a productive tension between reduction and expansion, in which the early economy of line and material does not simplify the self, but reveals its deeper complexity. By stripping the figure down to its essential gestures, he arrives at the hybrid beings that populate his paintings.

Cinthia Sifa Mulanga’s interiors are psychological and cultural architectures, inhabited by images, memories, and other versions of the self. Through these layered spaces, she asks: what happens when Black womanhood exceeds the identities through which it has been defined? Where Méné arrives at complexity by stripping down the figure, Mulanga builds complexity through accumulation. Drawn from art history, popular culture, and personal memory, her compositions gather references until the self emerges as plural — shaped by the many worlds through which Black womanhood has been represented and reimagined.

Georgia Semple’s paintings unsettle the stability of what appears before us. Her figures and objects seem to shift between presence and distortion, clarity and obscurity, as though perception itself were shaped by memory and belief. Rooted in her Guyanese heritage, family archives, and religious upbringing, Semple examines how inherited forms of knowledge continue to occupy the present. Faith and scripture become foundations through which she explores identity, belonging, and human fallibility, holding conviction and lived experience in continual negotiation. In Semple’s work, the uncanny emerges from the distance between what we see and what we know, where seeing no longer guarantees knowing.

In Uncanny Nature, the uncanny is neither a fixed category nor a resolution of uncertainty. Through Méné's exploration of what the self is connected to, Mulanga's inquiry into what the self is composed of, and Semple's meditation on what the self can perceive, it becomes a point of encounter where different inheritances come into relation, revealing both the connections they create and the tensions they carry.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

Each of the three artists works with the body as a site of transformation. What emerged in the space between their different ways of approaching it?

Alexandre Fabry (The Bridge Gallery)

What emerged is a shared sense that the body is never neutral. Each artist shows it shaped by something outside itself: ancestry, history, or perception. Placed together, the three practices form a kind of dialogue on how identity gets constructed rather than simply seen.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

You work with earth, kaolin, sand, bark pigment also — materials that carry their own temporal rational rather than remaining fixed in service of the image. What does working with that kind of agency do to your process and to the work itself?

Méné

I have always defined my art as a bridge between past and present. To me, earth is humanity's oldest material, crossing through the ages to reach us. Using earth or other natural pigments is therefore a legitimate way to reconnect with my roots and breathe an original dimension into my work. Even when it is not physically present in a piece, its spirit always remains.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

Your training in printmaking — intaglio, linocut, silkscreen — precedes your current use of painting and collage. What elements of that discipline remain embedded in your approach today, even as the medium has shifted?

Cinthia Sifa Mulanga

Layering is probably the strongest influence that printmaking has had on my practice. What fascinated me about printmaking was how multiple plates and impressions could build a new image through accumulation. That way of thinking continues in my painting and collage. Layering is both a material and conceptual strategy for me. The themes I explore of Black womanhood, memory, and identity are complex, and each layer reveals another aspect of those experiences. Printmaking also taught me intentionality. It made me think more carefully about why I use certain materials and techniques, and what each one contributes to the work.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

Your embroidery draws on ancient Guyanese garments and sits alongside collage, acrylic, and oil. Stitching introduces a different temporality — incremental, embodied, resistant to speed. What changes in a work when part of its construction demands that kind of duration?

Georgia Semple

I use embroidery within my paintings in the same way it has been largely used for generations: to embellish something that is already there. It comes as a final step for me. Though it does slow the work down in a way that painting alone can’t, and the act of embroidering is consuming, it doesn’t inform the nature of the paint in the way other mediums I use do. It defines and gives body, history, and meaning to a story that is already telling itself, much like the cultural garments that were worn in Guyana. It carries ideas of community and inheritance and also reflects the rhythms of labour that have existed across generations, through which I believe the paintings become more generous.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

Your figures are often described as “deceptively clumsy” — close to a child’s drawing, yet carrying an adult density. What do you think a childlike hand allows that a trained hand might lose or discipline out?

Méné

Cave art, which inspires me, is the art of origins par excellence. Everything began there. Dots, lines, marks, shapes drawn from the daily lives of people who expressed themselves with their heart, without artifice, without fear of judgment or convention. That is precisely where the connection to childhood lies. Beneath an apparent clumsiness, my work expresses a desire to return to childhood and capture its innocence, or rather, its truth. A child is spontaneously authentic, while an adult spends their whole life trying to get back there. That is the whole difference.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

Your interiors are sometimes read as populated by multiple women, though you’ve also described them as one figure across different states of being. When you’re painting, does it feel like a crowd, or like company?

Cinthia Sifa Mulanga

It feels more like company than a crowd. I never feel as though there are too many women in the work; if anything, I often feel there could be more. The figures allow me to explore the diversity and complexity of Black womanhood. Sometimes they are read as different women, and other times as the same woman across different states of being. Both interpretations are important to me and personal to the viewers. That sense of coexistence is what makes the spaces feel inhabited rather than crowded or forced.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

Some of your paintings are built from a single shade of color. Others layer family photographs, scripture, and inherited motifs. How do you think about the point at which accumulation becomes pressure?

Georgia Semple

For me, family photographs, scripture, and inherited symbols aren’t there just to explain the work; they’re fragments of a whole experience that sit alongside one another without resolving. Each of my paintings has very different stories to tell, and the freedom to let that story embed itself within the piece is the critical part. Sometimes they are as chaotic and indulgent as my worst fears. Other times, like a favourite memory, they feel spacious, light, and simply linger. So pressure is not something I think about, only whether accumulation or excess is the thing I am trying to convey.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

Your figures sit between human and animal, earthly and spiritual. Is that a place you paint from the outside, or somewhere from the inside?

Méné

My art bridges the human and the animal. It was born from a need to reconcile human beings with their own nature by confronting them with the animal, which is their double. It is a way of forcing them to look squarely into the mirror of a society that is nothing but a reflection of themselves.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

You once thought of the women in your paintings as dolls of your own invention, until you realized you were hiding behind them. What changed about the work once you let them be extensions of you instead?

Cinthia Sifa Mulanga

What changed was my relationship to vulnerability. I realised that many of the experiences I was depicting were not separate from me, but reflections of my own memories, questions, and experiences. Rather than hiding behind the figures, I began allowing them to carry parts of myself. The work became more personal and more honest. Symbols such as the doll also took on deeper meaning, helping me explore ideas around childhood, identity, memory, and growth. The figures are no longer characters I invented; they have become extensions of how I understand myself and the world around me.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

Your figures often shift between clarity and obscurity within the same canvas, mirroring what has been called "the tension between perception and reality." What kind of presence emerges for you in that instability?

Georgia Semple

I’m drawn to figures that never become entirely knowable. They sit somewhere between appearing and disappearing, which feels closer to how memory, faith and identity actually operate. I don’t think clarity is always the goal. That instability creates space for projection. It also reflects the experience of trying to understand yourself through things that are partially inherited, partially imagined and partially revealed. I think paintings become more alive when they continue asking questions rather than trying to answer them.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

Rock art predates any notion of individual authorship. What changes in your relationship to form when you work with something so historically distant?

Méné

The power of art lies in being timeless and universal. It is a captivating energy that is lived rather than explained. The past and the spirit of our ancestors never truly leave us. Each day, keeping our memory alive creates an invisible thread between generations, an essential act of transmission that connects us to where we come from and, above all, where we are going.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

Your interiors draw from images of women across art history and popular culture — sometimes tributes, sometimes recontextualized. How do you navigate what it means to work with images that already carry so much authorship?

Cinthia Sifa Mulanga

My relationship to those images has evolved over time. Initially, I was often drawn to an image because it visually interested me, but through studying art history and different artistic movements, I became more aware of how images carry meaning, context, and history. When I recontextualise an image, I'm not trying to erase its original meaning. I'm interested in placing it in conversation with the present, with new contexts. I think about what that image represented then, what it means now, and what it might suggest about the future. More recently, I've found myself recontextualising my own work as much as that of others. Because my practice is rooted in memory, identity, and transformation, I often revisit earlier ideas and images, allowing them to take on new meanings as I continue to grow and change.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

Your work brings together scripture and photographs from your family archive in Guyana. What kinds of relationships emerge for you when these different registers of image — sacred and personal — sit within the same space?

Georgia Semple

I've never experienced those things as separate. Family history and faith both shape how I understand myself, and I was fortunate enough to grow up with them deeply intertwined. I read the Bible with my dad and brothers every night before bed, and throughout the day I saw examples of those teachings embodied in my family life. So when scripture and family photographs meet in my paintings, it doesn't feel like bringing together two different worlds. It feels like returning to the environment that shaped me. Growing up in a God-fearing household gave me a lived understanding of scripture. So when scripture and family photographs sit together in my paintings, they don't compete with one another or explain one another. They simply reflect the way I've always experienced them.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

Méne, you had several artistic periods. Genesis was about searching for identity, Désert Crossing came out of the war in Côte d'Ivoire and your parents' passings, during your Boribana period you found love, and now La Cité Radieuse is described as joyful and light. Rock art and simplified form have been with you since. How does the same toolkit serve both grief and joy?

Méné

Art has been a genuine therapy during my hardest moments. The peaceful, pure, and free quality of cave art restored my faith in my future as a painter. From my wilderness years in Boribana to the Cité Radieuse, I had to face each trial as it came. Those moments demanded changes that allowed me to rediscover myself and push the boundaries of my creativity.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

Georgia, which toolkit has served you during opposite emotional weathers?

Georgia Semple

The process has remained somewhat consistent even when my emotional life hasn’t. Painting has always been where I slow down enough to notice what I’m carrying. Whether I’m making work during periods of grief or hope, I return to the same things: observation, repetition, scripture, family and the physical act of painting. Those materials don’t remove uncertainty, but they give me a structure to work through it. Over time I’ve realised that consistency of practice is often more important than consistency of feeling

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

Méne, Désert Crossing came out of a genuinely hard time in your life — and it's also when your forms became more precise. In retrospect, did you realize that something was quietly taking shape?

Méné

The wilderness years were necessary. They strengthened and shaped me. As they say, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." For me, that period was the true starting point of my resilience.

Fatima Bocoum (Culture Makes)

Cinthia, what period of your life most altered the direction of your work?

Cinthia Sifa Mulanga

The period that most altered my work was a time when many aspects of my life seemed to shift at once. Family dynamics, personal relationships, creative pressure, and broader questions about identity and purpose all converged, forcing me to reflect more deeply on myself and my practice. It was also a period of discomfort. I had reached a point of familiarity and comfort in my work, and I realised I needed to challenge myself rather than remain in that space. That process of questioning pushed me toward new forms of expression and ultimately led me to expand beyond painting into three-dimensional work. Looking back, that period taught me that growth often begins when comfort ends. The changes in my life demanded a different language, and the work evolved in response.

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