‘People Seem to be Trying to Reconnect with Nature’

‘I thought about how we’ve all gone through this traumatic event, the pandemic, and faced endless loss and illness,’ Nengi Omuku says. ‘I realized, via scrolling on social media and watching the news, that people seem to be trying to reconnect with nature and choosing to acknowledge all that it has given us.’

Written by Alayo Akinkugbe

Oct 31, 2022

Photography by Damilare Adeyemi / THE REPUBLIC

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, A New Chapter for African Artefacts?. Buy the issue here.

Nengi Omuku is an artist well-known for her ethereal paintings of figures who are void of facial features, suspended in empty spaces and often in flux. Her work has been acknowledged for its exploration of identity beyond physical appearance, and its ability to invoke internal, psychological spaces in the physical world.

Omuku’s recent exhibition, Parables of Joy, is based on her personal experience of ‘journeying into joy’. This journey coincided with the artist’s return to nature whilst in residence at Kobomoje Artist Residency in Ibadan. Omuku departs from the abstracted and interior settings in her earlier bodies of work and re-stages her phantom-like figures for the first time in abstracted, but evidently natural and verdant landscapes or interior settings laden with plants. In Parables of Joy, Omuku also portrays some of the people in her life in whom she found rest and respite during and following the global pandemic. The new series can be seen to synthesize two of Omuku’s great passions, horticulture and painting.

In the following conversation, we spoke to Omuku about her practice and her philanthropic endeavours.

ALAYO AKINKUGBE

Where were you born, and where did you grow up?

NENGI OMUKU

I was born in Warri, Nigeria. My dad trained and worked as a geologist for years before becoming an Anglican bishop, and my mum is a horticulturalist. My parents travelled a lot in my childhood because my dad was always being pulled from one place to another for work. So, I was born in Warri because that’s where he happened to be working, then we moved to Port Harcourt and eventually to Lagos.

ALAYO AKINKUGBE

Was artmaking part of your childhood?

NENGI OMUKU

It wasn’t at all. I don’t have any recollection of any artmaking before the age of 10. I don’t think I drew anything, thought about art or even consciously knew what art was. But, when I started secondary school at age 11, I was introduced to artmaking. I remember my first art class at Loyola Jesuit College in Abuja; I immediately had the feeling that this was what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life. That was my immersion into art.
I also ended up being the only art student at my school in the final year!

ALAYO AKINKUGBE

Do you think that was because of the social perceptions of artmaking as a profession?

NENGI OMUKU

Absolutely. At that time, the concept of being an artist was just so… odd. The people that I grew up with who excelled at art in school had all dropped it by the final year.

ALAYO AKINKUGBE

In what ways do you think that art has evolved in Nigeria since your studies as a teenager to produce the art scene that exists today?

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This story features in our print issue, 'A New Chapter for African Artefacts?'.

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About the Author

Alayo Akinkugbe

is an art historian, writer and the founder of Instagram platform, ABlackHistoryOfArt.

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‘People Seem to be Trying to Reconnect with Nature’

ALAYO AKINKUGBE

NENGI OMUKU

ALAYO AKINKUGBE

NENGI OMUKU

ALAYO AKINKUGBE

NENGI OMUKU

ALAYO AKINKUGBE

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