Moving between places changes more than where we live. It can change the way we notice ourselves.
Things that once felt ordinary become more visible from a distance. A familiar pattern, a particular colour, the sound of a language, the way food is prepared or the ease of being understood without having to explain yourself can suddenly carry a different weight.
I became more conscious of this after moving from Nigeria to the United Kingdom. The experience made me think differently about what it means to belong somewhere and about how much of a place continues to live within us after our surroundings change.
Sometimes distance does not make a place disappear. It makes us understand differently what it gave us.
For a while, I thought about belonging as a question of location. Where do I belong? Which place feels most like home?
Over time, the question became less geographical.
Home can exist in relationships, memories, cultural practices and familiar ways of seeing the world. It can be carried through colour, language and objects. It can also change. The home we remember is not always the home we return to, because places change and we change with them.
This has influenced the way I think about cultural inheritance in my work.
African textile and pattern are part of that visual conversation. I am interested in what happens when familiar visual languages enter a new work or environment. I do not want to treat them simply as decoration or as fixed symbols of identity. I am interested in what they can carry: memory, history, familiarity, association and connection.
Painting gives me another way of working through these questions. Sometimes an idea begins with a memory. Sometimes it begins with colour, a photograph, a conversation or something I have observed. The material changes according to what the idea needs.
Living in the United Kingdom has not made Nigeria exist only in the past for me. Nor does making a life somewhere new require everything that came before to remain unchanged.
There is a continual negotiation between memory and present experience.
Perhaps this is why I have become less interested in asking where home is and more interested in asking how home is made.
What do we preserve? What changes without us noticing? What do we inherit? What do we choose to carry forward?
I do not think there is one answer.
Increasingly, I understand belonging as something we construct and reconstruct throughout our lives. Place matters, but so do memory, relationships, culture and the freedom to recognise ourselves within the lives we are building.
The space between places is therefore not empty.
It is where some of these questions become visible.
