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Working with a distinctive process, Nengi Omuku transformed sanyan cloth, a traditional prestige Aso Oke textile, into canvas used to depict her immersive landscapes dealing with cultural memory, identity, collective experience and ultimately refuge.
Omuku’s abstracted figures, often faceless and fluid, were set in landscapes that conflate the artist’s observations of everyday life and hardships together with dreamscapes, to depict possible, thriving worlds. In blending personal and cultural memory with botanical elements, Omuku’s work challenged static, modernist visions of the city and instead offered an adaptive, inclusive model of coexistence.
Drawing from Impressionist techniques, Omuku carefully built the image through layers of brushwork and bold color, ultimately rendering a vision of a place that evoked the senses and welcomed viewers to enter into an uplifting, internal geography.
This exhibition was curated by Missla Libsekal and sponsored by Chapel Hill Denham.
THE ART OF HEALING WORKSHOP
Join The Art of Healing (TAOH) for a textile collage session that maps your inner landscape through colour and texture. Guided prompts will lead you to transform scrap fabrics into tactile compositions that express feelings and memories, culminating in a reflective shared moment and a meaningful piece to take home.
Founded in Lagos in 2019 by artist Nengi Omuku and co-founded by Ebisan Akisanya, TAOH is inspired by the UK charity Hospital Rooms, with whom Omuku has collaborated on mural installations and workshops. TAOH brings artists into locked psychiatric wards in Lagos hospitals, facilitating monthly art-therapy workshops and creating murals in partnership with artists.
TAOH’s impact to date: a workshop curriculum developed with over 40 artists, support for more than 500 patients, and 9 completed mural installations—with more in progress—across two sites at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH).
Whether you’re an artist, healer, educator, or simply curious, this energizing workshop invited you to slow down, listen, and create together. Come as you are — leave with a renewed sense of self, a collage, and a deeper appreciation for art’s power to heal.
The Art of Healing workshop held on Saturday 8th November at 3pm. This workshop was fully booked.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Using the subject of the body to translate interior experience, Nengi Omuku’s expressive oil paintings portray abstracted figures in spectacular, celestial landscapes that draw from the natural world, horticulture, and creationism. Omuku’s impressionistic landscapes and distinctive color palettes provide enveloping spaces for the artist’s loosely rendered individual and group portraits. Blending interior and exterior, figure and ground, Omuku explores themes of refuge and stillness interwoven with personal narratives and her West African heritage. Omuku paints in oil on sanyan, a traditional Yoruba Aso Oke fabric that the artist sources, and often commissions in order to keep the weaving tradition alive.