Two weeks into her residency at Dubai’s Taskhell Gallery, Yadichinma Ukoha-Kalu
had to return to Nigeria. Why? It was March 2020 and the first outbreak of the
Covid-19 virus brought a halt to all work and social activities in the capital of the
United Arab Emirates. “I was very afraid,” said Ukoha-Kalu over a Zoom call from
her base in Lagos in December, a few days after her second solo exhibition
Saffron In The Desert closed at Ko Gallery.
The exhibition at the Lagos gallery was meant to be the culmination of the work
she undertook in Dubai. But ideas for it were still in their infancy and the abrupt
return to Nigeria further unsettled the artist. One key challenge was the
discovery that a family member had suffered a drug overdose and was in need of
urgent medical attention – a development about which Ukoha-Kalu is reticent.
The news put a “big stop to residency work” she said “I have to be mindful of
how I talk about the work because of this experience that is at the center of it,
and I don’t know how much of it I can let out”.
The reticence is understandable, given the sensitive nature of the family
predicament. But it is frustrating – to the clueless viewer – if one’s aim is to fully
understand why Saffron In The Desert is chiefly concerned with psychological
healing and hope. To begin with, this was a complete turn from the set of works
Ukoha-Kalu set out to make during her Dubai residency, and for which she began
work in late2019. They were a series of watercolour paintings that were focused
on family portraits but revisited in “ghastly and ghostly faces”.
Not any more. Rather than the grim and glib, Saffron In The Desert (2020) evokes
the warmth of pastels in its repeated use of corals, whites, golden yellows but
also black, and then blue in the titular work: a risograph print in which the
constituent elements of the exhibition — and Ukoha-Kalu’s entire body of work so
far — are on offer. Straight blue lines drawing from each corner of the squarecome to focus on a smaller square, itself a corral of coral and circles with
squiggled borders. Also here are sloppy, concentric circles, pseudo-alphabets,
mountainous reliefs, a curving line that could indicate a river or lake in a
topography map. Other interpretations are welcome but this description best fits,
as a summary of key elements in Ukoha-Kalu’s work and a physical map of her
artistic practice.
Epitaph I and Epitaph II (2020) are near-identicals made by spraying orange paint
in an imperfect circle which confines fifty-six of the artist’s pseudo-alphabets, in
rows of seven by eight. Multiple Exits (2020)has eighteen concentric circles on
white tracing paper made by a random placement of kinky hair twists – belonging
to the artist’s mother – over which black paint is sprayed. For both Escapism
(2020) and Excavation (2020), Ukoha-Kalu has also employed spray-painting over
hair twists and pseudo-alphabets, but also amorphous laser cuts that resemble
doddled embryos. A composite of indefinable forms and shapes do not make for
ready meanings, especially when the constituent colours of black, white and coral
aren’t conventional conceptions of colour coordinations.
The diverse mix of media and material Ukoha-Kalu employed for Saffron In The
Desert range from watercolours to spray paintings, ink drawings to Plaster of Paris
sculptures. Absent from this exhibition are her interests in soapstone sculpture,
acrylic painting, pencil drawing, film art, sound art and digital art for which she
has a dedicated Instagram account titled Of Pure Technical Romance.
“My weakness is that I don’t end up staying with something for so long,” said
Ukoha-Kalu when asked about her changing interests. This alone frames the
question for a negation of her range rather than one which explores the interplay
between them, and the underlying (and unifying) reason — if there ought to be
one: “ it’s more about the idea for me which remains these amorphous beings,
this idea of abstraction, repeating patterns, disintegrating them, putting them
together, assemblage and doing that with imagined symbols. They can be
expressed in many different forms, which is why I try many different things with
them”.To the uninformed, Ukoha-Kalu’s changing choice of materials would appear to
come from an artistic whim. The mound of sand in the ko Gallery exhibition was
chosen because she noticed it outside a neighbour’s door and paid 500 Naira for
it. The laser cuts were made after she discovered the equipment in a studio in
Dubai. She decided to make watercolours with saffron after reading online that it
mixes well with water and the kinky hair twists were those her mom had in the
house.
The most consistent development of material is her notebook of sketches and
diagrams she has kept and developed for some years now. She picks from this lot
to make her pseudo-alphabets, amorphous forms etc. This notebook is the
building block for the “environment” as she calls her world creation and many
materials she comes across are used in service of these ideas.
Saffron In The Desert is Ukoha-Kalu’s most cohesive work so far especially when
compared to Of Thing To Come (2017). She’s 25 years old and is trying out many
different media and materials, her precocity has given way to a prodigious output
but she is yet to refine any one idea or technique enough to produce truly distinct
art. And we want her to. I believe she will but I want to step back from over-
consideration by distinguishing her work before 2020 when SITD is one step
forward in her maturation of her body of work.
One example is her spray paintings for which she uses a few layers of single
colour paint sprayed over a confined space. In the 1970s, and in her mid 20s,
Howardena Pindell was spraying layers and layers of paint – using a gizmo she
made herself – over one canvas till they looked like pointillist paintings with
innumerable colour actions happening at the same time. The point here is that
Ukoha-Kalu is still developing a distinct language and SITD is the first real
template for it.
Saffron, the current preoccupation in her new body of work, came during a
chance visit to Deira market in Dubai. Beyond her initial plan to reimagine family
portraits, what nature of work would she have made if she had found saffron but
did not have the family predicament to deal with and vice versa?“I would have tinkered things together but it might not be as emotional or deep
as the work turned out to be” said Ukoha-Kalu before burrowing deeper for
another answer: “I don’t think i can discount joys or the lightness of curiosity as
opposed to the heaviness of loss. They’re not two opposing things. They’re just
things in my head”.