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There is no actual gold in Treasure of Gold.

 

There is golden yellow.

It appears through some of the circles across a work constructed from four panels.

But when I called the work Gold, I wasn’t trying to imitate a precious metal.

Gold had become something larger in my thinking.

I was thinking about wealth.

Not only financial wealth.

Cultural wealth.

Familial wealth.

Inherited knowledge.

And I kept arriving at a question that seems simple until I try to answer it:

 

 

 

What makes one material precious and another ordinary?

 

My mother and cloth

When I think about value and textile, I think about my mother.

I remember her wearing Adire.

I remember how the cloth elevated her.

She looked beautiful in it.

But I also remember something broader.

My mother treated cloth as something valuable.

Not only Adire.

Clothing mattered.

There was care in the relationship.

I think that memory has acquired another significance for me because I now work with textile myself.

The material that existed around family life has entered the studio.

And the studio is no longer in Nigeria.

It is in Manchester.

 

 

 

What distance changes

 

I don’t want to say I took memory for granted.

That doesn’t feel accurate.

But memory has become more precious to me.

Perhaps it takes being away from home to understand something about home.

I have experienced that through material.

Adire can be familiar in one environment.

Then I bring it into my Manchester studio.

I cut it.

Layer it.

Place it beside coffee-dyed and studio-dyed textile.

Eventually it becomes part of an artwork.

The material has entered another context.

That makes me ask whether its value has changed.

And immediately I encounter another problem:

 

 

 

Which value?

 

Its cultural value?

Its personal value to me?

Its material cost?

Its value as labour?

Its value as artwork?

Its eventual market price?

Those things can overlap, but they are not identical.

 

 

 

Gold

 

Gold carries its own complicated language.

I associate it with wealth.

I also think about national treasure and the fact that Africa possesses enormous material resources.

But I think about cultural wealth too.

And that interests me because cultural wealth cannot always be measured through the same systems we use to measure commodities.

Knowledge can be inherited.

A technique can survive because people continue practising it.

A material can connect someone to a place.

A piece of cloth can become connected to a person you love.

None of those forms of value can be reduced easily to price.

That does not mean economic value is irrelevant.

Quite the opposite.

 

 

 

When cloth becomes art

 

There is another question I am increasingly willing to confront.

I want my artwork to become financially valuable.

I want it to be recognised.

I want people to collect it.

So I cannot talk about cultural and emotional value while pretending that market value exists somewhere outside my practice.

I take Adire into the studio.

I transform its context.

I make an artwork.

That artwork receives a title.

It enters my practice.

It enters exhibitions, websites, conversations and eventually markets.

A price is assigned to it.

What happened?

Why can a material have one economic value in one context and another when it enters an artwork?

What part of that difference comes from labour?

What part comes from authorship?

What part comes from transformation?

What part comes from reputation?

What part comes from institutions?

What part comes from desire?

What part comes from the market simply agreeing that something matters?

I don’t yet have a complete answer.

But I don’t want to pretend the question isn’t there.

 

 

 

You enter the question too

 

Perhaps the easiest way to think about value is to imagine that precious things announce themselves.

Gold shines.

Luxury signals itself.

Price tells us where something belongs.

But our actual lives are more complicated.

You may own something financially insignificant that you would refuse to exchange for something much more expensive.

A photograph.

A letter.

A piece of clothing.

An object inherited from someone.

Something brought from another place.

Its material may be ordinary.

Its relationship to you is not.

That distinction interests me.

Because when you stand in front of Treasure of Gold, you do not bring my mother’s memories with you.

Those are mine.

You bring something else.

Your own understanding of preciousness.

Your own experience of assigning value.

Your own relationship with material.

The work cannot control that.

 

 

 

What do we make valuable?

 

Maybe that is where the question becomes larger than my biography.

We don’t all treasure the same things.

We don’t inherit the same histories.

We don’t assign value through identical systems.

But we continually participate in acts of valuation.

We preserve something.

We discard something.

We collect something.

We pay more for something.

We protect something.

We remember something.

We decide something is worth carrying with us.

Markets do this.

Families do this.

Cultures do this.

Individuals do this.

And sometimes those systems disagree.

That disagreement may be where Treasure of Gold becomes most interesting to me.

Not because the painting tells me what is valuable.

Because it makes me question how value was created in the first place.

The work began with materials.

Adire.

Coffee-dyed textile.

Studio-dyed textile.

Four panels.

Circles.

Small appearances of golden yellow.

But I am left with a question much larger than gold:

 

 

 

What makes one material precious and another ordinary?

 

Perhaps the answer tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the material.

Ìṣura: Treasure of Gold
Part of the ongoing Ìṣura / Treasure series.

 

View Treasure of Gold

https://www.surajadekolaart.com/works/the-treasure-02/