“Time Spent With Good Souls Can Go a Long Way”: In the Studio With Olu Ogunnaike

Following recent institutional exhibitions at Spike Island, Hessel Museum and CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Olu Ogunnaike’s latest presentation, Is the soil right?, opened at London gallery Rose Easton earlier this month and is on view until 26 October 2024. In the show, the artist explores the parallels between humans and trees, tracing the moment a tree is uprooted from one geographical setting and placed in another. Is the soil right? includes seven large mirrored steel charcoal prints, four on each of Rose Easton’s two main walls, creating an environment that reflects people back onto themselves. In the lead up to the show, Ogunnaike documented the process of making the new works for Something Curated, published below alongside a conversation with the artist and SC’s Keshav Anand.

Keshav Anand: What interests you in the relationship between humans and trees?

Olu Ogunnaike: Just like people, trees breathe, while we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, they do the opposite, so therein lies a simple resonance; we are inextricably tied to one another.

KA: Can you tell us more about the process involved in making the works for the Rose Easton show?

OO: I’ve been developing charcoal dust silkscreen prints since my time at the Royal Academy. Using the last material state wood can occupy, “charcoal”, as the means to depict scenes of life throughout the city — it can be an ode to time and the people it’s spent with.

The last stage of my printing process requires me excavating or revealing an image by removing the excess dust from a work’s surface. However much the works in the show depict scenes of moments past, they are the remnants of wood, a material intrinsically tied to our presence… a presence which over the last few months has felt weary. So with this show I was reminding myself to push through and share moments that have meant a lot to me, even if coded. Here’s to moving through tough moments, when the soil is not right.

KA: What role does community play in your practice, and how do you see it reflected in this exhibition?

OO: We can’t exist without community, from the narrowest to the broadest terms the people we surround ourselves with contribute to a reflection of ourselves. Time spent with good souls can go a long way. The images from the show are just that, photos taken within, on route to or leaving the communities that make me and a lot of others whole.

KA: What attracted you to working with mirrored steel?

OO: A reflection! The ability of the material to instantly cast an image back to the viewer, quite literally putting a viewer in the work. Then there’s the strength of mirror polished steel combined with the fragility of charcoal dust, a nod to disturbing binaries. Ultimately different objects propped around my studio led me to it; sheets of copper and bronze that I had once used for etching gave rise to playing with the reflective properties of metal as they lay on the floor next to charcoal silkscreen printed on plywood. Thoughts then drifted to the starkness of steel that could become a touch more vivid with something placed on its surface.

KA: What are you currently listening to in the studio?

OO: Everything from the passing sirens to the raindrops hitting the window after falling through leaves — it really depends where my head’s at or what work is on the horizon. My mood changes throughout the day but Ache Distance by Elijah Maja, A Dream Goes on Forever by Vegyn, and Optimistic by Sounds of Blackness have been hitting the mark.

KA: And where’s your favourite place to eat in London?

OO: At the homes of the people I hold close or in my car with loved ones staring over the city before we move through it.



Feature image: Olu Ogunnaike, Is the soil right?, installation view, Rose Easton, London. 13 September – 26 October 2024. Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards