A fibre artist and the creative director of the contemporary womenswear brand, IAMISIGO, Lagos-born Bubu Ogisi employs making traditions from around the African continent to fashion wearable art that seeks to de-colonise the Euro-centric constructs of creative expression.

Adapting ancestral techniques and traditional materials, and combining them with unexpected elements such as raffia, sheet metal, even plastic, she communicates lost historical stories, transforming them into installations that challenge notions of the self and our relationship to our bodies, environment and the spiritual world. Depicted through unfinished edges and deconstructed silhouettes, the rawness that permeates Ogisi’s work, is her way of taking a political stance against the globally promoted Western sensibilities.

By exaggerating texture, structure and scale, she is able to break the rules and expectations of working with textiles and transform them into tactile experiences that transcend time, space and culture.

ABOUT THE WORK

ESU, 2022
Hand-crocheted wool on netted wooden frame
275cm x 105cm

Crying Green Forest Spirit 1, 2020
Hand-crocheted wool on netted wooden frame
54x94x9cm

Forest of Humanity is a new series of textile artwork that seeks to construct and convey new worlds
of the human imagination and survey the complexity, ambiguity and depth of the human mind and emotions
via the channels of human facial expressions. These new worlds are created using a new
crotcheting technique created by Bubu Ogisi to create numerous abstract faces, each with a different
expression yet each also equally ambiguous. Materiality is explored with recycled fishing net as the base and wool sourced from Kano, Nigeria’s mercantile and heritage artisanal city - a historic crossroads and a still-important forest of humanity. 

These myths and archetypes of mankind spin and weave stories of relationships, power and morality. In particular, Ogisi is exploring this new technique in relationship to the age-old archetype of the caregiver, the woman, who operates a principal role in society yet has been repressed for many years, only to find herself being resurrected and claiming her power in the zeitgeist. 

Each individual crotchet, done tediously by hand represents a new field of vision and power created to show the importance of preserving handmade processes and upcycling to fight against our planet issues. 

Her ancestral pictorial weavings emerge from a desire for threads to be articulate again and find a form
for themselves to no other end than their own orchestration, not to be worn or used, only to be looked at and respected- much like the divine feminine. 

Instagram: @bubuogisi