There is a question I have been asked more times than I can count: where are you from, really? The person asking usually already knows the city I live in, the accent I carry, the passport I hold. What they are reaching for is the other thing — the root beneath the root.
I grew up moving between two cultures, two sets of expectations, two languages of the self. Nigerian in the home, British in the world outside. Neither place fully claimed me, and for a long time I thought that was something to overcome.
Living between two cultures is not a crisis. It is a kind of creative inheritance.
It took me years to understand that the discomfort was not a gap to be filled but a space to be inhabited. The work I make now lives in that in-between. Colour that does not belong to one tradition. Forms that refuse to settle. Patterns that move between West African textile lineage and contemporary digital aesthetics without apology.
Fabric has become one of my primary materials precisely because it holds this tension so well. Cloth carries culture. It carries memory. A piece of ankara placed beside a digital printout is not a contradiction — it is a conversation across generations, across geographies.
My grandmother's wrappers. The racks of polyester school uniforms. The first time I pulled up a digital swatch on screen and felt the texture of it behind my eyes. These are not separate memories. They are the same reaching, the same hunger to understand what beauty means when the world has given you more than one answer.
I no longer try to resolve the in-between. I try to honour it. Every piece I make is an attempt to hold both — to say: I was here, and there, and the distance between them was not empty. It was full of colour.
