Author: xerkss

Class 1975, born in Australia and raised in Nigeria, Nnenna Okore is an artist we love!

Nnenna Okore creates suggestive abstract sculptures and paintings reminding of natural primordial shapes. Graduated in Art at the University of Nigeria, she then received the Master of Art and the MFA title at the University of Iowa. Currently, Okore teaches Art at Chicago’s North Park University.

The artist uses a combination of biodegradable materials for her artworks. Paper, ceramic, fabric, hessian are the tools to represent her figurative imaginary.
The natural world seems to be the true heart of her inspiration. Even though her representations remind of the planet’s flora, her artworks are vibrant, and appear to encapsulate time and space.

Nnenna Okore’s Education and Career

The artist moved from Australia to Nigeria at the age of four. Her parents worked as academics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She spent there most of her childhood.

After secondary school, she moved to Swaziland for her high school studies. Actually, already during primary school, Okore showed a significant interest in visual art, achieving even in her young age awards and recognitions.

At the beginning of her university course she tended to use oil and acrylic paint as her artistic medium. By the third year, she implemented atypical materials in her creations. Her path toward sculpture began. She started using leather, jute, photographs and leaves, among others, to mark an expressive urgency.

Her interest flew into a vivid passion that pushed her to experimentations. Still today, her inspiration underlines a different artistic purpose, that goes in the field of the world’s origins.

In spite of being still a university student, she soon chose to focus on inventive recycling. The environmental issue started to pierce her works. Her art soon became a medium of protest and denounce. This intent, related to the Nigerian experience, never left her.

In 2001 Nnenna Okore moved to the United States for a master of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa. She started her academic career in 2005 at North Park University, teaching three-dimensional design, sculpture and drawing.

Okore’s artworks have been exhibited in over 80 solo and group shows in Africa, Europe, Asia and North America. Her artistic influence caught international press attention. She received enthusiastic reviews in publications such as The New York Times, Art South Africa, Sculpture Magazine and Financial Times.

As a result of her innovative sculpture and environmental commitment, she won many art recognitions. Among others, she received the Artist Full Fellowship nominee at Global Art Village in Delhi, India, the Artist Residency, Jean Paul Blachere Foundation in France and the Teaching Fellowship at the Skidmore College in New York.

Nnenna Okore’s paintings, to the origins of the Earth

“My inspirations derive from varying organic forms in nature, especially captivated by the ephemeral passage of time”

The artist celebrates nature at its primordial stage. Her artistic imaginary tells about birth and decay, life and death. In her artworks is possible to find a note a melancholy but the ode to Mother Earth is loud and clear.

The organic forms of nature are crystallized in their apex. It almost seems like they are going to perish in the exact following moment captured by the artist.

Okore underlines how much we still depend on nature, how much we rely on Earth’s resources for living, for surviving. This is why the artist focuses on the important task to preserve the planet. She represents nature’s fragility as a way to inspire human awareness.

“I strive to celebrate the beauty of life while it lasts. Even after it fades away, another bloom will come in the form of a new birth”

The ability of Earth to regenerate is what impresses Okore the most. While exploring diverse artistic possibilities, she keeps dedicating her art to nature. 

Art we love

Nnenna Okore’s art ranges from sculpture to painting. Her stylistic approach puts nature in the first place, from the choice of using recycled materials, to the subjects of her creations.

She takes inspiration directly from Nigeria for some of the techniques she uses. The daily activities of weaving, sewing and dyeing observed in childhood, find application in the artistic field.

In her artworks, there is the eco of the African world she knew as a child. The warm colors and typical materials tell about her background, nevertheless, the delicate beauty pervading her works involves the entire humanity!

Visit the artist’s gallery on RDN Arts: Nnenna Okore’s gallery

Born 1973 in Meknes, Morocco, Ghizlane Sahli is an artist we love!

She studied at the École d’Architecture de Paris-Tolbiac and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville. Afterwards she came back to Morocco, this time to move to Marrakech. 

The artist works primarily with waste and repurposed materials. She uses her interdisciplinary knowledge, ranging from architecture to embroidery, to create pieces of art from plastic bottles and silk.

Her inspiration comes from coral reefs, the human body, and hives. In her artworks the perfect shapes of nature, the scheme behind each entity, meet a sense of integration. Everything seems connected, alive.

Ghizlane Sahli’s career

Ghizlane Sahli combines the love for architecture with her enthusiasm for textiles. This particular union of arts made her win the Prize for Creation at the Trophée Couleurs in 2009. 

As a result of her multidisciplinarity, she co-founded in 2012 the artist collective Zbel Manifesto, born from an environmental need. Its aim was to use repurposed materials in art creation. The collective participated at the Marrakesh Biennale in 2014, with an artwork called “Pimp My Garbage”.

From there, Salhi’s artistic recognition grew fast. She exhibited her artworks at David Bloch Gallery, Marrakech (2018) and Genesis, Institut Français, Rabat (2017).

Furthermore, her works were in The Body, Abla Ababou Gallery, Rabat (2018), L’or, Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, Marseille (2018) and The Black Sphinx II, Primo Marella Gallery, Milan (2018).

Among this year’s participation, there is Africa now – MO.CA, Brescia, 1.54 Contemporary African Fair – Primo Marella Gallery, London, Africa Universe -Primae Noctis, Lugano, Quintessense, Not a Gallery, Paris and BISO Biennale de Sculptures de Ouagadougou, Ouagadougou.

Nowadays Ghizlane Sahli works with local artisan women. While creating, they constantly reinvent the ways to integrate silk into art.

Sahli transforms the material, giving it a new reason to be, a new meaning. That is why her three-dimensional “Alveoles” appears so dynamic, as it could change under the spectator’s eye.

Sahli’s solo exhibition “Histoires de Tripes” (2019) is her more recent work, displayed in London, Paris, Marrakesh, Milan, and Germany.

Ghizlane Sahli’s artworks made from recycled materials

For the artist, in the process of creating her cellular forms, everything starts with the recollection of plastic bags. Thanks to the artist’s architectural background, the plastic is sinuously integrated with a metal frame and then covered in silk threads.

Salhi’s ability to unify diverse materials so elegantly gives her a unique touch, a very personal vision of art. She gives expression to human form, showing what we are all made of.

Ghizlane Sahli uses intricate designs to create something that recalls coral reefs. ”Histoires de Tripes” includes sculptures and drawings. These represent perfectly the idea of integration the artist expresses in her pieces.

Art we love

Salhi’s artistic concept is universal. Everything suggests universality in her work: from the materials used, mostly plastic and silk, to the shapes of her pieces. 

As a matter of fact, she doesn’t focus on society or belonging issues. While the man tries to give himself a definition, Ghizlane Sahli denies any social, religious or racial distinction. She focuses on a way wider issue: the origins. 

Identity can create barriers, it can be an alienating concept. However, once there is no filter left, identity starts to embed everything that surrounds us. It becomes an exploration, an adventure.

Ghizlane Sahli thinks of the “Alveoli” as cells. These accumulate until something grows. 

“I wanted to work on a subject that was just pureness, the inner part of us and the human body was the best subject for that. Using garbage was also for me something really universal because it concerns all of us. I wanted something that was like a tribute. This work is the exploration of the human body. Each artwork is zoomed into different parts of the body.”

So, environmental sustainability and the bridge between body and mind are two sides of a medal.

Ghizlane Sahli uses diverse media to convey her message: drawings, installations, and sculptures. Passing through them, it is certain: a sense of inclusion pervades all her art, and anyone, looking at her artworks, can feel being part of the universe.

Visit the artist’s gallery: Ghizlane Sahli’s gallery

Artist We Love: Sokari Douglas Camp

Born in Boguma, Rivers State, Nigeria, Sokari Douglas Camp is an artist we love!

Class 1958, Sokari Douglas Camp grew with her brother-in-law, anthropologist Robin Horton. She moved to England as a child, but she often returned to Nigeria to visit her family and participate in the traditional activities of the Kalabari tribe.

She studied at the Central School of Art and Crafts in Oakland, California, earned her BA degree at the Central School of Art and Design in London and the Master of Arts title from the Royal College of Art.

The artist’s work includes many sculptures in steel inspired by the two cultures that forged her: African and Western cultures. In her art the echo of Kalabari rituals is strong. At the same time, there is fierce criticism of colonialism and gender inequality. It comes with passionate participation in environmental issues. Above all, the one concerning the pollution in Niger Delta.

Sokari Douglas Camp’s perspective unites the two cultures without duality; the two worlds are welded in a daring message full of expressive freedom.

Sokari Douglas Camp’s Career

Sokari Douglas Camp’s international reputation grew fast, converging in more than 40 solo shows worldwide.

Her sculptures are part of the permanent collections at The Smithsonian Museum in Washington  D.C., at the British Museum in London and at Setegaya and Tokyo Museums.

Many international galleries in France, Japan, Italy, Spain, United States, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Cuba, South Africa, and Britain exhibited her art.

Among her most important personal exhibitions, there is certainly “Spirits in Steel – The Art of the Kalabari Masquerade” at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

This exhibition integrates sculptures, photographs, and videos inspired by masquerade practices in Buguma. The life-sized sculptures installed in one long gallery give the impression of entering in a progress area of the masquerade. She observes the complexity hidden in the concept of identity. She seems to consider how distant is the perception of masqueraders from the way they present themselves.

Sokari Douglas Camp received important awards for her artistic vision and her commitment to representing social and global themes within her sculptures.

In 2005 she received the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of her services to art, in 2008 the one of Governor at University of the Arts and in 2017 the title of Honorary Fellowship of SOAS, University of London.

Sokari Douglas Camp’s Sculptures

Alongside these works, Camp created important public memorial sculptures. Among these, there is the “Battle Bus”, The Living Memorial to Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigerian writer, and environmental activist.

It is the artist’s ability to represent contemporary concerns through matter, folklore, dances, and rituals that stands the perfect artistic synthesis between African and Western worlds.

Despite the criticism of both societies, the compromise succeeds, and the two realities merge into a harmonious but outlined whole.

Actually, this compromise is the basis of works such as “Primavera”, the wonderful steel sculpture. In this artwork, European classicism and Kalabari themes come together but the interpretation can come from different perspectives.

On the other hand, in works like “Europe Supported by Africa and America” the relationship between the two worlds is different. The work includes three female representations of Africa, America, and Europe and is inspired by William Blake’s drawing.

Art We Love

Irony and playfulness have an important role in Sokari Douglas Camp’s work, making her art even more fascinating. The foundations of her work continued their evolution with a surprising development. 

Among her most appreciated works there is “Green Leaf Barrel”, an iconic expression of her Nigerian roots and British education. The artwork represents a woman goddess creating growth from an oil barrel. Green Leaf Barrel is inspired by the condition in the Nigeria Delta, polluted and overcrowded. With this artwork, Camp focuses on the positive sides of life itself confirming her irony once again.
The path of this artist is remarkable and her art continues to result exuberant and mysterious, daring and aware. Sokari Douglas Camp is definitely an artist we love!

Visit artist’s gallery on RDN Arts: Sokari Douglas Camp