Some artists relish the pristine white walls of a gallery, able to surround their immaculate creation with clinical absence. Nigerian-American Precious Okoyomon is not one of these artists, as anybody who navigated their mulchy, decaying, and regrowing landscape within the Arsenale sheds of the Venice Art Biennale 2022 will recall. There, a meandering path through topology, bushes, and mud sculptures, within a space shared with snails and butterflies, was not only explored with the eyes, but also the nose as a nature-led act of resistance against racism.
Butterflies made a return alongside an animatronic bear in Okoyomon’s recent project at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis in Rome – the artist transforming the deconsecrated church into a humid and sweaty tropical forest where butterflies lived their best – if short – lives in a purpose-designed habitat. Fragrant honeysuckle and roses grew alongside plants poisonous to us humans, but from which the butterflies took nourishment. Okoyomon’s work flourishes in non-gallery spaces that offer a pre-existing sense of place, within which they expand the otherness and create a new world of unexpected, immersive, and complex interior landscapes.
