This painting draws from a Yoruba parable that understands love as shared labour. Love is shown through cooperation, not performance. The home rises through balance, trust, and mutual effort, honouring partnership as endurance, structure, and collective becoming.

Ọkàn kan kì í gbé ilé dé One Heart Alone Cannot Build a Home

This work interrogates inherited identity and the psychological frameworks imposed through family, culture, and expectation. Set against a charged red ground, the figure confronts the viewer with steady resistance. Swirling lines and fragmented forms suggest unseen forces shaping perception and selfhood. The title poses a direct question: how much of who we become is chosen, and how much is constructed for us? The painting navigates autonomy, imprint, and the quiet tension between influence and self-definition.

Why Was I Constructed in Your Image?

Rooted in an Oron proverb about the limits of youthful vision and the wisdom of elders, this painting both honours and questions tradition. While age grants perspective, the child may climb toward horizons the elder cannot see. Between them lies tension — risk and reflection, safety and discovery. The work suggests culture evolves through this dialogue, growing not only by preserving inherited wisdom, but by embracing new insight and returning it to collective memory.

Su ogbono oñwi ẹtei ku izọñ ogid, uyetọ ọnuñẹdẹ onniñi ugim ekid igid ou! (…Even if a child climbs ugim — a very tall tree — they cannot see.)

A tribute to the bond between mother and daughter, this work reflects guidance passed through symbols, journeys, and inherited marks. Each gesture carries love, legacy, and direction. Now a mother myself, the responsibility feels deeper — to pass on knowledge, healing, and cultural memory. As my daughter grows into her own becoming, questions of identity and belonging will remain. In creating this piece, I confront the gaps in my own story, seeking wholeness to pass forward.

Rooted in her, reaching though me 

Architecture of Stigma I explores how prejudice is subtly constructed within communal spaces. Beneath festive bunting and a warm red sky, figures gather in apparent celebration, yet quiet distortions reveal invisible hierarchies and exclusion. At the centre, a young girl stands with a suitcase, symbolising displacement and inherited awareness. The work suggests stigma is built through repetition and silence, shaping identity long before it is consciously understood.

Architecture of Stigma 

This painting draws from an oral proverb about how small, persistent actions build lasting strength. A mother lifts the insect toward the sun, embodying resilience as both symbol and lesson, while her child receives not only her words but the inheritance of wisdom. Set against vibrant red tones and patterned detail, the work honours storytelling as a vessel of endurance. Scar-like markings trace memory and continuity, reminding us that strength forms patiently, layer by layer.

Ovu onu ugbarasuñ (Ugbarasuñ is an insect that moulds soil into rock through sheer strength)

Happy Family examines the layered performance of unity within diasporic identity. Four figures stand closely aligned, bound by proximity yet marked by individual histories. Set against a red ground of inheritance and emotional intensity, a shared yellow halo suggests collective memory rather than perfection. The obscured eyes echo silent transmissions — what families protect, conceal, and carry forward. The work questions whether harmony is natural, constructed, or consciously maintained across generations.

Happy Family 

The Becoming explores identity as an evolving state shaped by inheritance and self-awareness. Set against a red ground symbolising maternal origin and generational imprint, the figure stands in conscious transition. A yellow halo suggests awakening rather than sanctity, while white markings trace coded memories across the body. The obscured eyes reflect both protection and limitation — what is seen, and what must be unlearned. Becoming is not arrival, but deliberate transformation.

The becoming 

This painting stages a quiet dialogue between the modern self and ancestral memory. The figure turns inward, listening across time. Healing unfolds through continuity-marks, patterns, an colour acting as vessels of heritage. The past i not left behind, but held, guiding identity through sustained connection.

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Esther Phillips

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