Art is how I take the Egba women’s hands further. I use fabric as it carries what words cannot — labour, identity, the cost of being seen.
You decide who will appear in Artforum Magazine, take home $25,000, and display their work at The Art of Elysium's Salon!
Textile installations and mixed media compositions that layer traditional and contemporary fabrics. There is something irreplaceable about working with cloth — its texture, history, and weight. When fabric fills a space and viewers move beneath it, something shifts. The work stops being art and becomes an encounter with memory, labour, and identity.
Where do you find inspiration?Abeokuta — my hometown in Ogun State, Nigeria. The Egba women who made adire cloth there for generations are my primary inspiration. I also find it in the parallel between indigenous textile traditions and global systems — how both encode value, identity, and the body. Inspiration lives wherever cloth has been used to mark what matters.
What would you do with $25,000?Travel to Abeokuta to work directly with adire makers — sourcing materials, documenting their process, and building a relationship that honors the labour my work is rooted in. The remainder would fund the production of a major immersive installation and professional documentation of the Ìṣura / Treasure series for international gallery submissions.
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