To Precious Okoyomon, chaos can be an artistic tool. Time and time again, they have created massive site-specific installations from entire rooms and galleries and turned them into spaces for play, respite and reflection. The artist is known for their use of organic materials to explore the connections between past racial constructions and global ecological transformations.
As an artist and a poet, they incorporate poetry that borders on pain, beauty, decay, and humour into their work to question the inseparable relationship we have with nature. With a focus on the multiple layers of growth, Okoyomon uses sculptural topographies which often include living, growing, decaying, and dying materials – including rock, water, wildflowers, snails, and vines in their work.
Image courtesy of Artsy
For their exhibition titled “Earthseed”, which was presented at the Museum für Moderne Kunst’s Zollamt gallery, Okoyomon had the entire floor of the former customs office covered with several feet of topsoil. A dense green blanket of young kudzu plants was planted months before the exhibition opening. One thing the 27-year-old Nigerian-American artist is going to do is remind their audience of not only their own historical background as an artist but the origin of the unusual and foreign materials that they use in their work; like the kudzu vine, which is illegal to cultivate in the United States as it is considered an invasive specie. For the exhibition, the roots had been imported from Amsterdam, and in five months they had grown so large that the kudzu vines had taken over the gallery space. One with the disruption, the artist stays questioning the many possibilities that can be birthed from their experiments with a ready need to affirm the new perspective. As the kudzu vines took up space in the exhibiting area, crickets, butterflies, and snails made space for themselves at the core of the presentation.
Okoyomon’s work can cause the audience to gasp with awe, admiration and respect but it will inspire reflection on the global environment on the brink of collapse. These immersive habitats have become an important part of their multidisciplinary practice, and they have encompassed everything from books of poetry incorporating text speak to edible ball gags made from frozen cold-pressed cucumber juice. After the exhibition, the trees are sent to community centres, local schools, and education centres for replanting purposes. The soil is repurposed too.
Image courtesy of the Museum Für Moderne Kunst
At the 2022 Venice Biennale, their landscape installation from a constructed and elaborate environment was overgrown with sugarcane and the chaotic and widely invasive Japanese vine kudzu. Both plants bound up with a representation of the transatlantic slave trade, which was a procession of figurative sculptures made out of raw wool, dirt, and blood, then surrounded by butterflies.
In their new work “To See the Earth before the End of the World” (2022), named after a poem by Ed Roberson, Okoyomon’s sculptures are set against a landscape of wild flora; here the untameable kudzu appears again in the middle of a network of rivers and sugar cane, the latter of which the artist’s grandmother grew in her backyard when Okoyomon was growing up in Nigeria.
The recurrent use of the kudzu and the sugar cane are metaphors for displacement and survival. Sugar cane is a plant whose entire essence is saturated with the economic and historical context of the transatlantic slave trade, much like the kudzu vine.
Although Okoyomon has only been exhibiting for about four years, they have re-imagined new worlds and created new ecosystems from their larger-than-life site-specific installations.
“I make worlds. Everything, every portal I make, is its own ecosystem.”
– Okoyomon.
