Adaeze Okonkwo

Adaeze Okonkwo was born in 1987 in London to a Nigerian family and studied painting before turning, in her late twenties, to cloth. She works at scale in raw linen, unbleached cotton and indigo-black dyed fabric, building large fields from pieced rectangles that she seams, darns and patches by hand. The works are hung flat or left unstretched, the labour of their making deliberately unconcealed: thread is knotted on the surface, repairs are left legible, edges fray. Within these abstract grounds faint figures sometimes surface, ghosted into the weave rather than depicted, present and withheld at once. Her concerns are labour, repair and inheritance, and the cloth itself as a kind of skin and a kind of record. Okonkwo treats mending not as restoration but as a form of accounting, each stitch marking time spent and damage acknowledged. Restraint governs the work; nothing is decorative. A rising mid-career artist, she has exhibited in institutional group exhibitions in Britain and abroad and is represented by Brunner & Sand, Zürich. Her practice has moved steadily toward larger, quieter works in which the seam, more than any image, carries the weight. She lives and works in London.

I start from a damaged thing and decide how to keep it. The stitching is not there to hide the tear; it is there to record that the tear happened and that someone sat with it. Cloth holds the body that wore it long after the body is gone. I am interested in what a repair admits.