UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #1190

Overall Research Project Description How might reimagining objects through the lens of traditional textile practices reveal new intersections between mobility, identity, and material memory?
Objects carry traces of the lives that have handled them, they hold memory and history, as Arjun Appadurai writes in Modernity at Large, “Commodities, like persons have social lives’’. As a figurative painter, I often appropriate everyday objects to function both as material and metaphor.
One recurring object in my work is the light-weight plaid tote bag, which comes in many forms and names across the globe. It has become a personal travel essential for me and carries a collective memory in Nigeria linked to migration in the 1980s, when it gained the name “Ghana Must Go” within the region. In my practice, I deconstruct and reconfigure these bags to resemble woven textiles. Textiles play a major role in my culture- the Igbo culture in southeastern Nigeria. Popularly called wrappers, they are often gifted to me by my mother, and do not only serve as cultural signifiers, clothing, covering or fashion items; like the plaid bags, they have historically been used to wrap and carry belongings.
The goal of my art research is to draw parallels between the function of these travel bags and the tradition of wrappers/textiles from a personal and collective lens—reimagining the bags as the wrappers and positioning them as performative sites where memory, movement, and identity are carried, layered, and continually reimagined.
My project is presented in two forms: a series of sculptural paintings and a two-part installation.
1. Sculptural Paintings
This includes a series of three mixed-media works where I paint representational and abstracted figures in acrylic on canvas, printmaking and sew them onto the deconstructed bags which still has some of their utilitarian features retained.
2. Two-Part Installation
The second component is an installation featuring embellished travel bags that are presented both as bundled forms and as spread-out textile-like surfaces. These arrangements echo the form and language of Kimsooja’s bottari bundles, evoking mobility, wrapping, and containment.
Furthermore, for the paintings, the subjects are individuals whose lives involve movement –fellow students or people with any compelling stories connected to textile symbolism in their cultural or domestic lives. I paint them in acrylic on canvas, using printmaking to stamp their fabricated identification numbers, marking their movement across geographies. These figures are then sewn onto folded bag surfaces, introducing a sense of motion and tension within the fabric. Finally, I embellish the bags to create an ambiguous space—one that both idealizes their complex experiences and highlights the celebratory aspirations and accomplishments embedded in those journeys.
The installation component of this work involves arranging the cut-out, embellished bags as bundles and also spread-out fabrics, evoking acts of movement—departure, arrival, stay etc. It also functions as a form of performance, as the traditions surrounding textiles add a performative and embodied dimension to their role as containers. This positions my practice within a continuum where these appropriated bags, now transformed into textiles, operate as living, mobile archives.