www.ije-artist
Ije (pronounced eejay) – A conceptual/expressionist mixed practice artist – painting, poetry, installation, sculpture, printing, photography, film and curation. MA Fine Art Birmingham City University. My work seeks to reshape embodied notions, responding to encounters with time, space and change through making and documenting; generating works activated through colour, gesture, texture, layering, repetition, and reflectivity.

Undertaking durational activity in the landscape, I wonder about what went before me and what may lie ahead; I wonder about singularities and multiples, about time, capacity for change and the energy around me. Through colour, memory, fabrications, words/phrases, feelings, documenting, repetition and gesture; my work seeks to reshape embodied notions, responding to encounters with time, space, place and change. Works vary in size, most often on a larger scale and are rhizomatically connected through conceptual series: perdurance/time/memory; topographical encounters/natural elements; prepositions of space; identity/movement/fabrication.

All work starts with a refrain - sound / colour / movement initiated during my activities which gathers intensity, galvanising the physical, expressive process. I work quickly and intensively with large gestures; materials like water, mutable, full of potential; concealing, revealing, creating spaces in between, worlds within worlds to be explored, to get lost and found, these spaces I go when I’m journeying.

In 2018 I began to integrate works as PFHOEMS – painting/ film/ photography / poetry / spoken word and explore sculptural forms using “yarn”, textiles, paper, metal and clay; experimenting with concepts of growth/mutability/interconnectedness through shaping spaces, suspension and weaving. Going forwards, identity is becoming increasingly significant and with louder voice and I am finding the confidence to express my current manifestation as a woman of colour, a Scottish, Nigerian healer living in a world that has sought to impose gender and/or racial expectations upon me.

I take commissions and run individual / small group creative painting workshops.

Currently I have two collaborations underway: 2 Meeters with Thomas Vassaux and Journeys In Time (JIT) with Jo Powers and Thomas Vassaux. An active member of GRID Studios and Rugby Artists Group (RAG), I have also held committee roles for RAG, Warwickshire Open Studios (2013-2017) and the Association of Midland Artists (2011-2014).