Artist Statement

My practice as a painter is a dialogue between erasure, displacement, identity and visibility. 

The Postcard Series in its current iteration, has evolved to reflect my lived experiences as a non-immigrant, international student from Nigeria, navigating the complexities of life at Cornell University and in Ithaca, especially within the shifting socio-political landscape of the United States under the current administration.

Continuing my work with archival materials that I sourced from The History Center in Ithaca and Cornell’s Rare Manuscript Collections, I create paintings that cut across different moments in history. They are layered with plaster, paste, and colors and the resulting texture acts as a trope for the partial and fractured ways that history is recorded and remembered, how It is sometimes obscured, and dare I say aggressively rewritten. The postmarks and stamps speak to the specificity of time and location, personalized to each individual postcard canvas. These pieces ask the question about what it means to belong in a place that constantly questions your presence.

Running concurrently is my expanded Mask Series titled identidades suprimidas (Suppressed Identities). 

Here I draw inspiration from W.E.B Du Bois’s articulation of double consciousness, that internal conflict experienced by many individuals who are forced to see themselves through the lens of a dominant culture that denies or distorts their identity. For Du Bois, this is the idea of "two-ness" of being both Black and American; for my sister and other Big-Bodied individuals, it is just existing and "Being called FAT"-the constant dealing with body shaming and body dysmorphia.

In these paintings, my figures hover between visibility and erasure. Their distorted proportions and  blurred contours mirror the psychological tension of being simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible and I believe this duality plays out in how our bodies are viewed in general by the world, and by ourselves.  In a yearn for cohesion, I use similar layering techniques with materials like plaster and other media, as in the Postcard Series, to reveal and conceal, almost like memory and trauma, that we try so hard to hide. 

Recently, I introduced ceramics into both bodies of work, drawn by the tactile nature of clay. I was immediately reminded that memory and identity can be reshaped. 

It shows me a new kind of intimacy in its fragility and I am interested in how it carries memory in a different way, and extends the visual language of my practice into three-dimensional and interactive experiences.