• Friday, March 29, 2024
businessday logo

BusinessDay

Taiye Idahor: Female artist on the rise

Taiye Idahor: Female artist on the rise

If you are a keen follower of the Nigerian visual art circle and the artists, you will spot Taiye Idahor with ease. The Fine Art graduate from Yaba College of Technology Lagos is gifted, amid enthralling works that speak volume about her creative ingenuity. Though she specialized in Sculpture at the college, today she runs a multimedia practice amid experiment with new concepts.

One intrigue about the artist is her sheer ability to use collage, drawing, sculpture and mixed media to contemplate ideas through the lens of memory, culture and modernity. Also, using drawn and collaged photographic elements, she skillfully reflects on the historical and contemporary status of women within an increasingly globalized society, starting from Nigeria, her country of birth.

If you saw her first solo exhibition titled ‘Hairvolution’ in 2014 at the Whitespace Gallery in Lagos, and her current shows, you will marvel at her fast she is honing and mastering her skill, as well as, the gradual attainment to a high level craftsmanship in the art space.

In 2018, staged her first exhibition in the United Kingdom, a successful outing that spoke volume of her creative ingenuity and mastering of her craft. Titled ‘Okhuo’, which translates to “woman” in Bini, the exhibition showcased the cultural splendor of Bini coral beads at Tyburn Gallery in London where she generously displayed her signature works.

While in Hairvolution, she focused on the identity of women using “hair” as a visual language in her work, in Okhuo she used figurative renderings of Benin iconography, the most prominent of which are coral beads to honor powerful women, especially in the ancient Benin Empire and contemporary Benin woman.

Read also: International Women’s Day: Celebrating top Nigerian female visual artists

The Okhuo series further spotlighted her techniques; photo paper collages with pen drawings in coloured pencil, which depict dressed coral beads worn as worn by individuals against clear white and black paper, as though suspended in a clear cloud. There was no human face on it, hence offering a composition, which gave her work an ethereal beauty. She admitted leaving out the images in order to speak of the presence that should exist within the beads, but that was absent.

Art critic, who follows her works, once said that Idahor’s works embody absence through the voids and the empty spaces that are apparent in her collages but they only express her constant questioning of the issues she is exploring while leaving room for the audience to also contemplate them.

She also lends support to the women’s cause. She uses female faces including her own to confront issues surrounding women in Nigeria, their daily struggle with culture and tradition in the modern world.

Recalling her days of little beginning and the lessons learnt then and encouragement that still propels her. “I remember when I was working with Olu Amoda during my one year internship in 2003 or was it 2004?!… Anyway Mr Olu would always say that every piece of metal he had left over from the gates or windows and art he made were very important”, she says.

Aside from her solo outings, she has participated in many joint exhibitions and projects such as the Presidential Inauguration Exhibition Abuja Nigeria 2011, Dubai Art Fair, Marker 2013, Standing Out, an all-female artists exhibition at Temple Muse in 2016, among others. Also, Idahor’s intricate collage and pencil drawings, which reflect Bini royalty and ancient African feminism, were among the work on display at the maiden edition of Art X Lagos.

Some of her works are in major museums across the world including being part of the collections of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa; the Davis Museum, Wellesley, Massachusetts; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

She lives and works in Lagos.