As a queer Yoruba Nigerian raised in an evangelical Christian household, I grew up within a culture that actively suppressed the cosmologies and ancestral knowledge of my own people. I am separated from my land, traditional religions, and ancestors who resisted and rejected multiple forms of violence: spiritual, sexual, colonial, and domestic. My current work centers spiritual and sexual violence, not only as tools historically used to dominate and discipline colonized bodies, but as intergenerational traumas often carried in silence. My sculptures and installations are ways of reaching toward what was taken—an attempt to reanimate fractured ontologies and to mourn what has been buried under the weight of forced conversion, cultural shame, and bodily violation.
Embedded in my practice is an interrogation of Christofascism and its role in the colonial project—how religious ideologies have been used to justify the demonization of Indigenous Black spiritual practices and uphold systems of sexual and spiritual violence. My figures resist legibility and assimilation, bearing the weight of memory across lifetimes. Their surfaces are veiled and distorted to assert opacity as a mode of resistance. In Passing Through, I staged a disconnection between two Yoruba figures who, despite their shared heritage, evident in their tribal markings, are unable to recognize one another. This loss of mutual recognition speaks to the severing of cultural continuity under colonial domination.
Materiality in my work is ancestral. I work with found domestic objects, red-dyed burlap, wax, chicken wire, and wood not just for their tactility, but for their histories. These materials carry the weight of labor, mourning, and forced assimilation. Objects like tables, kettles, and ringing phones transform the ordinary into something ominous, revealing how trauma embeds itself in the fabric of the everyday. Red burlap, evoking the biblical sackcloth worn by Tamar after her rape, is a recurring motif across my sculptures and installations. The red, signifying blood, flesh, trauma, and urgency, along with the burlap’s rough and utilitarian connotations, underscore the harshness of that sexual violence, while also marking how such trauma is often obscured or silenced through forced religions.
My artmaking is deeply informed by a lineage of Black artists who have carved out space for vulnerability, resistance, and spiritual reclamation. Across my work, I draw from theorists like Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe to examine the relationship between visibility, desire, and domination. Fanon’s libidinal economy and Mbembe’s necropolitics intersect in my installations, where Black and Indigenous bodies are portrayed as both sacred and surveilled—fetishized, feared, and systemically denied sovereignty. Eating the Other literalizes this condition, A Body Bent on Apology mourns the internalized spiritual consequences, Passing Through honors what has been lost, and Residual Heat maps these violences onto the domestic sphere.
My work does not seek to resolve trauma or offer catharsis but rather to create a space where damage can be seen, where memory can take form, and where Black people refuse to be forgotten. Each piece contributes to a larger ecosystem of resistance: one that centers Black and Indigenous survival and reclaims the right to spiritual and embodied complexity.
