Ifeoma Anyeaji, a visiting Nigerian visual artist at the Godown Art Centre, is an interesting artist. With not more than a month in the country, her presence has been felt on the Kenyan art scene.
When she arrived at the Godown Art Centre, a month ago, she began by collecting discarded polythene bags, encouraging fellow artists at the centre to assist with the collection of the bags. Polythene bags of varied sizes, types and colours were dropped at her temporary studio in numbers.
In visual art, there are several common medium used in creating art works — oil, acrylic, charcoal, pencil, and canvas. But for the Nigerian, the choice of working with plastic (polythene) bags and bottles is spurned out of her interest in the reusability of found or discarded materials and the need to control environmental hazards posed by this medium. “Plastic bags are a global issue, they pollute the environment and so I thought of a way to make use of them,” she says.
Reusing materials is an inspiration to her work and no other medium than these polythene bags could best represent her ideology on consumerism, and excessive accumulation, referenced by her repetitive craft process of threading and conceptual forms that portray a sense of architectural and organic structures, like walls, and furniture. Threading and weaving of the plastic bags is reminiscent of the traditional hair braiding and fabric warp-weft weaving in Nigeria. “As a little girl, I was good in threading, which is an art of weaving hair with threads and this is the technique I wanted to incorporate into my work, by way of repurposing its use the same way I was repurposing the discarded plastic bags and
bottles.” Anyeaji has worked with plastic bags as a medium for two and-a- half years. Although her initial efforts with this medium were impulsive, over the years she has perfected her skill. “My process can be likened to an assembly factory,” Ifeoma says of the complex process of preparing her materials. After collecting the waste plastic bags, Ifeoma cleans and then shreds them before arranging the bags in a line, like clothes set to dry. In the second stage, the bags are delicately wrapped in strings to form what she calls “plasto- yarns,” which look like sisal ropes, and worked into patterns. Her intricate patterns are shaped into various structures that reference walls, spaces and domestic furniture.
Some of the furniture are functional in spite of being made of discarded plastic bags and bottles. “The world is mainly composed of recycles where one concept is borrowed and perhaps
embellished to be useful elsewhere,” she explains. Ifeoma clearly understands the cycle of ideas. With the constant use of plastic bags she will not run out of materials. Owing to the processes involved in her work, Ifeoma considers her art very communal and takes interest in the response provided by art lovers. It is for this reason that, even though she is African, she considers herself as basically an artist but not simply an African artist. “The tag African leads to stereotypes and it would be my wish for people to view my work entirely as a work of art and not merely as African art,” she says. Ify, as she is popularly known, had her first degree in painting at the University of Benin in Edo State, Nigeria. Afterwards, she moved to the US to take a graduate degree in environmental sculpture at the Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Even though Ifeoma attributes her inspiration to finding a remedy for pollution, she agrees that the process of creation is pleasurable. Ifeoma Anyaeji stays in the country for the next one month. Her works will be on a solo exhibition at the Alliance Francaise, Utalii Lane in Nairobi on September 17, 2013.
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