Emerging visual artist Samuel Nnorom, who recently bagged an international award, believes he is on the right path in terms of his art.
Nnorom won the Art for Change prize last month for his work titled After the Pandemic. He walked away with a £10,000 (about R204,000) cash prize, as well as having his winning artwork displayed at Saatchi Gallery in London.
The Nigerian national, who has been producing sterling work tackling issues of identity using Sankara fabric, has been collecting awards in the past two years. He belongs to a group of young artists who enjoy exploring and pushing boundaries with their art. In 2021, he won SA’s Cassirer Welz Award, which qualified him for a 10-week residency programme at Bag Factory Gallery in Fordsburg, Johannesburg.
Speaking to Time Out while in Nigeria, Nnorom said he was excited to bag the first ever global art competition which focuses on breaking down barriers within creativity, diversity, equality and inclusivity. The award gives emerging artists from all over the world an opportunity to compete with their creativity. He was able to wow judges with amazing work looking at the effect of the Covid pandemic.
“For my awards and winnings it is a divine blessing of my effort. The two awards basically mean a lot to me and encourage me to keep working. I am on the right path to contributing to humanity and history. The secret is that I am in God’s favour.
“I have persistently practised against all odds by trying out different studio experimentations before I heard an inner conviction to move in the direction of my current studio practice. Therefore, my studio explorations combine conceptual, intellectual and experimental energies, which are carefully delineated into a visual form.”
In his winning piece, Nnorom used fabric as a social structure. He is interested and inspired by African print wax fabrics popularly known as Ankara fabric because of the stories it carries of the people.
“The Ankara fabric represents my community and a larger African community where it is used globally. I became more interested and inspired to use bubbles form during the global pandemic, which seem to me as a structure that encapsulates all our fears, worries, cares, humanity, love, social circles and class, and so on, just to keep safe and hope. So, the bubbles became a language of hope and safety. However, in recent times my work is inspired by the everyday life of people and general human condition.
“I still want to explore lots of mediums such as performance photography, textile, sculpture, painting, printing and graphics that reflect migration and integration to be solo exhibited at The Art House, Wakefield. Although the element of my bubbles of Ankara fabric remained as my visual voice, I will keep working and keep believing in the direction of the material and process until history is recorded in the right narrative.”
Defining his work in general, Nnorom says: “I am interested in the identity and meaning that fabrics represent, especially the Ankara fabric, which is mostly consumed in [my] local community and West Africa. Fabric suggests to me a social structure or social organisation that weaves humanity into society. In the case of the fabric of society or social fabric, however, it is peculiar to different societies while bubbles suggests a structure that holds or stores something for a period of time.
“My work processes through actions like cutting, rolling, stitching, sewing and installation to engage viewers in self-interrogation, critical thinking and questioning of socio-political structures and the human conditions of what truth and conspiracy connote to our daily lives wrapped in bubbles.”
Nnorom discovered his talent at the age of nine while assisting his father in his shoe workshop. His work is inspired by time spent in his mother’s tailoring workshop as a child, where he first experimented with colourful fabrics, sewing needles and thread.
Born in 1990 in Nos Jort, Nigeria, he holds a Bachelor of Arts in education from the University of Jos and is currently concluding his masters in fine art in sculpture at the University of Nigeria.
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