Wura-Natasha Ogunji: space comma space comma space

Wura-Natasha Ogunji's exhibition space comma space comma space embraces not-knowing, the breaking of habits, irreverence and the use of mistakes as integral components of the creative process. Through works on paper, the artist creates a memoir of her time inside the studio - through acts of stitching, cutting, tearing and tracing. The drawings, paintings, and collages are in conversation through shared marks and methods, as well as through titles which suggest a more literal dialogue between the works themselves. With this new body, Ogunji uses magazine pages, gessoed tissue paper, and glassine, as well as the architectural tracing paper for which she is known. Many of the works have an almost-hyperbolic density to them--especially when considered alongside her past oeuvre where stitched figures are commonly surrounded by large expanses of paper-space. There is an irreverence for the correct way materials should be used: oil paint on tracing paper, a two-sided painting (where only one side is visible, but both are important), or the combination of oil and ink forming a resist pattern of dots along the surface of the trace. In other works, like Lagoon in Tatters, cut paper becomes fringe, leaving two large openings, the paper falling beyond the edges of its own borders. In a similar drawing, those same lagoon lines become an oasis. Or, perhaps the large hole in the paper is the space of refuge. This dance between the fullness, or presence of (artistic) matter, and absence is a recurring language throughout the show, lending an almost-trickster like quality to the work, especially when considered in concert with the titles. The four painting-drawings on gessoed tracing paper present a poetic riddle with their titles: What I want something something same same a thing in a thing in a thing, the mountain was mentioned, are you my mother? The mother figure appears often in the form of the Gelede mask, part of the Yoruba ritual festival for celebrating women and mothers. For the artist, the paper itself becomes a ritual space. The lines, gestures, marks, motion, cuts and cutaways of thread, graphite, ink, paint, paper and earth are the elemental languages of ______________, _______________, ________________. Here space takes on multiple meanings. It is, of course, form, emptiness, but, and another space entirely. The stillness of the comma; the thing around the thing you're trying to get at; a lull but not a lapse. The paper, too, has polyrhythm. tiwani.co.uk