Ifeoma U. Anyaeji

Biography
© Colin Davison
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With Plasto-art I create very conceptually complex organic sculptures and installations of intricate textures and colours that reference architectural forms, domestic spaces and furnishings, reiterations of personal and collective memories or cultural experiences, and discourses about the human body.

-Ifeoma U. Anyaeji

Born in Benin City in 1981, Ifeoma U. Anyaeji is a Nigerian neo-traditional artist who decided to pursue art as a full-time career by exploring her boundaries as a female artist beyond the conventions of her initial academic training in painting. She later continued her earlier interest in sculpture and deepened her passion for creating unconventional art and reusing discarded objects, an interest spurred by the ongoing environmental problems she encountered in her community, particularly from non-biodegradable plastic bags and bottles.

Experimenting with these waste environmental pollutants, engaging in possible processes of remaking and reusing objects, particularly with unconventional art techniques and traditional craft processes, Anyaeji developed an art style she calls “Plasto-Art.”

This is an eco-aesthetic process of remaking, in which she transforms her primary medium - used non-biodegradable plastic bags and bottles - by applying her craft skills in a traditional Nigerian hair braiding technique called Threading, combined with traditional basketry and fabric weaving techniques.

Using this technique, Ifeoma creates conceptually highly complex and organic sculptures and installations with intricate textures and colors that reference architectural forms, domestic spaces and furnishings, reiterations of cultural experiences and discourses on the human body.
Works
- Eze Fuo eze anochie, (When a king leaves another replaces him – no condition is permanent), 2013 (edited 2015, 2019, 2021/2022)
Eze Fuo eze anochie

This piece is a highly representative example of the artist practice and of her process of threading the plastic bags (repetitive and labour-intensive) that brings the sculptures making to be a years working labour. At a glance, the threaded plastic takes on the quality of fabric or wool.

Each plastic braid is shaped and layered by the artist into densely textured sculptural forms characterised by their distinctive vibrant colours, coils, spirals, circles and loops.

This piece has been commenced in 2013 during an artist residency in Nairobi, Kenya and has been re- elabored until the 2021/2022. This work is bound up with Nigeria's political histories of power and opposition, its colonial past and its rich and diverse cultural history.
Using a method which she describes as "Plasto-art', Anyaeji binds the plastic with thread into intricately woven braids using a traditional Nigerian hairstyling technique known as Ikpa Owu or Ikpa Isi Owu in Igbo.
Igbo is the native language of the Igbo people, an ethnic group of South Eastern Nigeria - it has approximately forty-four million speakers.
Ikpa Owu (or Threading) is an increasingly obsolete hair-craft passed down through the generations, from mother to daughter. The practice has almost disappeared because of the country's colonised history and the pressures for a global identity, which underlines more of a Western outlook. It is now considered more fashionable to use chemicals to straighten or relax hair for styling.

The reason Anyaeji started to thread plastic bags is that she missed doing her sisters hair, the tactile-ness and togetherness and the sense of community that happened when you got together and did each other hairs. it’s a way of keeping the practice alive even if no one wants their hair done like that anymore.

Combining Ikpa Owu with traditional basketry and fabric weaving techniques, Anyaeji reflects on the loss of such traditions, whilst the use of plastic - a major environmental pollutant - speaks of the devastating impact of human activity on Nigeria's landscape and natural resources.
There is a variety of different shapes in this work.

Speaking about the spirals made with the threading technique Ikpa Owu she said: “circle is symbolic for me because it means as a continue”.

The little bulbous shapes are actually from what’s called “pure water” in Nigeria.

You can get bottled water but for those who can’t afford that the cheapest option is “pure water”. They come in sachets, you bite them open and drink it, then discard the packet and because it is a much smaller operation, the University of Benin which Ifeoma attended, had their own “pure water” company and she always saw the packets lying around and they’d be more and nothing was being done with them. So that’s where she started taking the non-biodegradable plastic and turning it in to more sculptural work and that adjoined with the plastic bags to give it a more textured and varied feel.
Plastic became a problem because we were used to discard everything without thinking of the ambient, my choice to use plastic was an environmental response... When I was experimenting this material I understood that I wanted to take this on and shifted into sculpting.

It wasn't originally my intent to be a sculptor than a painter but I began to nourish and understand this material I was working with.

- Ifeoma U. Anyaeji
Exhibitions
Bibliography
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Ifeoma U. Anyaeji CV

Born in 1981 in Benin City (Nigeria).

EXHIBITIONS

Solo Show

2023

Ifeoma Ugonnwa Anyaeji : Ijem nke Mmanwu m (The journey of my masquerade), Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland, GB (upcoming)

2021

Africa Universe - Part II, Primo Marella Gallery, Milan, IT

2020
Nzuko Umuada, nke abo (the Second Meeting of the daughters of the land),
2019
Ezu hu ezu – In(complete), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom
2017
Courtyard Project - Swirl Bin, FOFA Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

2016
A no m'eba… (I am here…, Presence, Absence), Galerie d'Art LSB, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2015
Owu, Skoto Gallery, Chelsea, New York, USA

2013
Transmogrification, Skoto Gallery, Chelsea, New York, USA
Plasto-yarnings: a conversation with plastic bags and bottles, Alliance Française, Nairobi, Kenya
2012
Reclamation, The Craft Studio Gallery, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA
Now I’m born this way will you still see me as…, Lewis Center, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA
2011
Okilikili, Lewis Center, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA
The Things We Leave Behind, Lewis Center, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA

Group Show

2023

UNUSUAL MATERIALS AND FORMS FOR A NEW AESTHETIC, Primo Marella Gallery, Milan, Italy

2018
The Black Sphinx II, Primo Marella Gallery, Milan, Italy
The Black Sphinx II, Primae Noctis Art Gallery, Lugano, Switzerland
Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials, Palmer Museum of Art, Chazen (traveling group exhibition till 2020)
Les Éclaireurs – sculpteurs d’Afrique (collection Fondation Blachère), Palais des Papes, Avignon, France

2017
Skoto Gallery, Chelsea, New York, USA
In Edeniye, a City of the Future, Yermilov Center, Kharkiv, Ukraine
Up: Rise Leve: Levee, Galerie d'Art LSB, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
While no one was looking, Galerie MainLaine, Montreal, Canada
Be Bold for Change, Female Artists Association of Nigeria
Celebration of Black History Month, Bank of Montreal rue St. Jacques, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

2016
Dissonant Integrations, Ethnocultural Art Histories Research and Z-Art space, Montreal, Canada

2015
Gallery Artists, Skoto Gallery, Chelsea, New York, USA
SalonEsque, MAI Gallery, Montreal, Canada
Thresholds: Presence, Absence, and Territory, Gladstone Art gallery, Toronto, Canada
Basket Case II, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

2014
La Parole aux Femmes (Women Speak Out), Fondation Blachère, Apt, France
Women in National Development, Female Artists Association of Nigeria and French Embassy in Nigeria, Abuja, Nigeria
The Role of Art in National Development: Society of Nigeria 50th Anniversary, Omenka Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria
Basket Case II, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, Zimbabwe
News
- Unusual Materials and Forms for a new Aesthetic - Coming from selected African artists
  14 December 2023 - 30 January 2024 December 14, 2023
  Primo Marella Gallery is pleased to announce its next new gallery exhibition in Milan! The gallery will propose a group exhibition, in which a precise...
  Read more
- PMG ArtGeneve booth featured in Le Quotidien de L'art
  primo marella gallery booth featured as the cover of the journal February 1, 2023
  The article states: Contemporary African art was on show at a number of stands, including that of Milanese gallery Primo Marella, which presented five artists...
  Read more
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