‹ Back

I began Treasure of Light with materials already familiar to my studio.

Adire.

 

Coffee-stained textile.

Material I had dyed myself.

They entered the painting differently.

The Adire connects to a longer relationship I have with Abeokuta and with Yoruba cultural heritage.

Other surfaces had been stained or dyed in my Manchester studio.

Once I began cutting, layering and placing them beside one another, I wasn’t simply working with colour.

Different places were already somewhere inside the process.

Not as illustrations.

Not as symbols that could be translated neatly.

But as part of the conditions through which the painting was being made.

And then there was light.

 

 

 

Ìṣura

 

The larger series is called Ìṣura.

Treasure.

When I first began using that word, I was thinking about Adire and cultural heritage.

But “treasure” has never stayed still for me.

One work led to another question.

A memory could become treasure.

Time could become treasure.

A material could make me reconsider value.

And eventually I arrived at light.

The title produced a question I did not immediately know how to answer:

 

 

 

Why call light a treasure?

 

Perhaps part of the difficulty is that light cannot be possessed in the way we normally imagine treasure.

You can experience it.

Depend on it.

Miss it.

Notice its absence.

Watch it change something.

But you cannot keep morning light in a room.

That difference interested me.

 

 

 

Manchester

 

I was making the work during quiet early mornings in my Manchester studio.

There is a point when the room slowly begins to reveal itself.

Edges become clearer.

Colours begin separating.

Parts of the painting that were already present become easier to see.

I kept returning to the pale areas.

They seemed to push through heavier surfaces around them.

The easiest interpretation was available immediately:

light equals hope.

But it arrived too easily.

I became suspicious of it.

I didn’t want the title to decide the painting before I had properly looked at it.

 

 

 

Nigeria was also present

 

The studio was in Manchester.

My mind was not only there.

While making the work I was thinking about Nigeria — economic and political uncertainty — and more broadly about inequality, instability and the search for security while living away from home.

Those concerns did not become an image inside the painting.

The darker textile does not stand for Nigeria.

The pale material does not represent an escape from instability.

I don’t find that kind of translation useful.

What interests me more is the coexistence.

I could be physically in Manchester early in the morning.

Adire connected to Abeokuta could be on the studio table.

Nigeria could be present in my thoughts.

Questions about uncertainty and security could exist beside the physical problem of arranging pieces of textile on canvas.

None of those things needed to cancel the others.

That feels closer to how experience actually works.

 

 

 

What distance changes

 

Living away from home can change the value we give to things.

Sometimes distance makes something more visible.

Sometimes absence gives ordinary experiences another weight.

Sometimes instability makes security feel less abstract.

I have been thinking about this in relation to Ìṣura.

 

 

 

Does uncertainty alter what we recognise as treasure?

 

I don’t want to answer that for every work.

But Treasure of Light has made the question harder to ignore.

Light is ordinary until it isn’t.

Security may feel ordinary until it is uncertain.

Home may feel ordinary until distance changes our relationship with it.

That does not mean light stands for security or that home stands for brightness.

The connection is more provisional than that.

The painting lets those questions remain near one another.

 

 

 

Material moving between places

 

Adire is important here for another reason.

It does not enter my studio merely as visual pattern.

My relationship with it connects to Abeokuta and to my Yoruba cultural heritage.

I work with it now in Manchester.

That movement does not erase where it comes from.

Nor does using it in Britain leave the material unchanged in my own relationship with it.

It becomes part of another situation.

Placed beside coffee-stained and studio-dyed surfaces.

Cut.

Layered.

Interrupted.

Reconstructed inside a painting.

I increasingly want to understand what happens when materials move between places and begin participating in new contexts without requiring their differences to disappear.

I don’t yet want to turn that into a conclusion about the entire practice.

It is something I am observing.

 

 

 

Light without resolution

 

Eventually I stopped asking the painting to tell me that everything would become bright.

The lighter fragments did not need to repair the heavier parts around them.

They remained beside them.

That was enough.

And perhaps that returned me to the title.

Why call light treasure?

Maybe the better answer, for now, is another question:

 

 

 

What becomes valuable when certainty is no longer guaranteed?

 

The work is finished.

That question isn’t.

 

Ìṣura: Treasure of Light

Part of the ongoing Ìṣura / Treasure series.

 

https://www.surajadekolaart.com/Treasure-of-Light/