Portrait by Patricia Li

born 2003 in Houston, Texas
lives and works in Ithaca, New York
(she/her/hers)

Onajevwe composites images and objects through assemblage and collage, working across photography, found images, wood, metal, textile, and cement. These industrial yet familiar materials hold memory, carrying traces of both personal and collective histories. Her practice unfolds as a journey of ancestral reckoning and presence, one that is guided as much by intuition as it is by material. She makes for a future unknown to her, leaving a prior version of herself in a room as a trace to be discovered.

Working primarily with wood, she draws on its familial and domestic associations, grounding her practice in ideas of home and inheritance. Within this framework, she fixes images in resin, adorning material surfaces to conjure moments of Black being that she deems pivotal. Her ancestors move through this process with her. They are the pulse between her eyes, the sacred hum when meditating, the glitter as it glides from her hands onto the surface, a silent presence in her periphery. She feels them in her chest like a burning star.

In her sculptural collages, domestic interiors become sites of both tenderness and disorientation. When decontextualised, they hold the tension of the familiar and the unknown. Making, for Onajevwe, is a process of not knowing and of becoming, a movement between constriction and release. A tightness in her throat followed by release. It is euphoric.

This sense of transformation extends into her engagement with religious imagery, which she subverts to reflect on a Westernised post-colonial Nigeria. While her work is often read as political due to her position as a Black artist, it is not born from obligation but from an intrinsic need to make. She has described herself as a spirit child, compelled to create and to redress both her family history and the Western canon of art history, bringing perspectives like her own to the forefront.

Underlying her practice is the recurring presence of the number four. It operates as both structure and symbol, shaping the way her work comes into being. One of four children, Onajevwe understands this number as deeply personal. Within her life and practice, it signifies protection and spiritual growth, a quiet framework through which all things are made.