African Artists’ Foundation (AAF) is pleased to announce the first Meet the Artist event of 2013 featuring the tapestry works of Ibrahim Adebayo Lawal in a two week exhibition titled Memory and Metaphor.
The Meet the Artist event is a preamble platform for group and solo exhibitions created to introduce young and emerging artists to the public.
Ibrahim Adebayo Lawal’s Memory and Metaphor opens on Thursday18 April, 2013 at 6 PM at African Artists’ Foundation Gallery, 54 Raymond Njoku Street, Ikoyi, Lagos. Works on display from 18 April – May 03, 2013.
Storytelling has always played an integral role in African communities and oral narration was the primary means of passing down creation myths, folk lore and idioms from one generation to the next. These stories stitch and define the fabric of every society from which they originate.
In a bid to capture traditional symbols of power, deity and origination, Ibrahim Lawal succinctly harnesses the technique of embroidery and quilting to create tapestries of cultural and historical significance that explore traditionalism in contemporary Nigerian culture. Lawal researches and accumulates the ingredients of Yoruba folklore by intricately translating the figures of festival masquerades onto locally woven cloth, aso oke. These works create a visual time-line of folklore and customs while questioning the location of our indigenous identities. Lawal describes his tapestry work as ‘agbara asa’ which means “power of culture.”
Lawal is a self-taught artist with origins in the fashion embroidery industry.