In collages, films, sculptures and installations Wangechi Mutu reflects on sexuality, femininity, ecology, politics, the rhythms and chaos of the world and our often damaging or futile efforts to control it. First recognised for paintings and collages concerned with the myriad forms of violence and misrepresentation visited upon women, especially black women, in the contemporary world. Mutu explores and subverts cultural preconceptions of the female body and the feminine, she proposes worlds within worlds, populated by powerful hybridised female figures. Her practice has been described as engaging in her own unique form of myth-making, one in which the interweaving of fact with fiction opens up possibilities for another group of symbolic female characterisations, markedly different from those that appear in either classical history or popular culture.

Mutu has worked extensively with Mylar polyester film. Manipulating ink and acrylic paint into pools of color she carefully applies to her surfaces imagery sampled from disparate sources - medical diagrams, fashion magazines, anthropology and botany texts, pornography, and traditional African arts. The resulting works are a rebuke to the conventions of aesthetics and ethnography and eroticism that underpin such publications, offering instead an existence that is riotously free of biological determinism or psychological conditioning. In recent collage-paintings a substrate of vinyl and linoleum allows for a more densely textured and sculptural ground. Painterly techniques are employed alongside Mutu's signature construction of images comprised of deftly cut-out and collaged forms.