Conversation with Nigerian sculptor Nnenna Okore in her studio

The first time I saw Nnenna Okore’s work was at the Newark Museum and I found it very poetic and compelling. Hung from the ceiling, transparent strips of shredded burlap dyed with clay like color, felt tactile and earthy yet paradoxically also ethereal and majestic. That dichotomy intrigued me.  Shortly there after, I found myself in Chicago where Nnenna Okore lives and works.  I got in touch with her and scheduled a visit to her studio at North Park University where she teaches.

Nnenna Okore completed her B.A in painting in Nigeria where she was the student of El Anatsui. It was under his guidance that she refocused her studies towards sculpture, which she studied at the University of Iowa completing an MA and MFA. She is now an Assistant professor at North Park University in Chicago.

Okore recycles discarded materials and objects and transforms them into intricate sculptures. While her work highlights the wastefulness of our consumerist society I feel that it is firmly grounded in nature, in the processes of birth and decay, in other words, in life cycles whether it be a tree, an object or her own body as it ages. This awareness of life processes informs her choice of materials. During our conversation she told me that as a young child growing up in southeast Nigeria in the town of Nsukka, she would walk through the rural communities and be on the lookout for objects, either man made or from nature, in partial decay whose texture and shape intrigued her.

I wanted to learn more about her working process. Okore showed me some of her burlap pieces at first and explained how she made them.

Listen to the follow video to hear her working process.

Making art is for Okore a very physical experience. Just as she saw women in her childhood community engage in repetitive daily tasks, she weaves, sews, rolls, twists, and dyes. She responds to the nature of her chosen material whether it is burlap, plastic, paper, or clay and rope and adapts her process. She takes what comes to her and works with it. The process is organic and she speaks of “ collaborating with the material”.  When she creates a large sculptural installation she starts with a broad idea of how it is going to look but no specifics.  The context and the nature of the chosen material play as much a role in determining the end result as her intervention. She has until now very much refused to take full control. However, in one of her more recent pieces, her approach is shifting and she is imposing more structural elements and deliberately aiming for something more visceral.

Finally we walked into the back room where one of her large clay pieces was rolled up and lying on the floor against the back wall. As we unrolled it, hundreds of small rolled clay pieces woven into burlap revealed themselves. This had obviously taken Okore hours to do.  While the sculpture seemed to not have a particular shape – it looked like a  very large wall hanging-  when she showed me how she installs it, I understood the second part of her working method. It is in the installation process that many of her pieces undergo a final shaping as she gathers the material in a particular way or hangs the panels on different planes sculpting the space.