Suraj Adekola

ARTIST STATEMENT

 

 

My work feels closer to music and poetry than image. Music and poetry don’t explain themselves. They create conditions for feeling that bypass the analytical mind and arrive somewhere deeper. What you feel when you stand in front of a Miles Davis recording or a Lao Tzu verse — something happens before you understand why. The meaning and the experience are simultaneous. My work sits in that harder space between abstraction, identity, memory, labour, value, inheritance, and spiritual residue — without needing to announce itself loudly.

 

 

My work begins in Abeokuta, Ogun State, where adire cloth has long functioned for generations as economic currency, spiritual object, and living memory. Made by Egba women, traded through networks that sustained households. I grew up around it before fully understanding its meaning. My mother wore it. I followed my father through Abeokuta as a child, absorbing its presence without yet knowing how deeply it would shape me.

 

 

I was born in Lagos. I live and work in Manchester — a city built on the same colonial textile trade that extracted value from the traditions I carry. In my studio I use adire sourced directly from Abeokuta together with fabrics coffee-dyed and artificially aged by hand. The coffee is not a neutral material. Its scent carries my mother — her morning ritual, now gone — and carries me, newly arrived in a cold country, warming myself against unfamiliar weather. Two memories held in one material. 

 

 

I romanticise the idea of vintage. I work with fragments of adire alongside artificially aged and distressed textiles, assembling layered surfaces that move between memory, labour, migration, and value. The staining and aging are not decorative gestures. They are attempts to travel backwards through material — to sense the time embedded in cloth, the bodies that carried it, and the histories that remain inside it. Through layering, repetition, erosion, and repair, the textiles begin to behave less as surfaces and more as carriers of time. I am not referencing history. I am continuing it.

 

 

The work lives in the liminal space between textile and painting — where the viewer needs to find their own way in. Across wall-based compositions and immersive hanging installations, viewers are invited to move around and in front of layered textile environments where personal memory and collective history fold into one another. Rather than offering fixed narratives, the work opens spaces for reflection — on what transforms anything into treasure, and the shifting ways value is assigned to bodies, traditions, and cultural forms, particularly within the relationship between Africa and the global systems of value.