VERDANT AFRO ART

What’s one thing you wish you had started doing earlier in life?

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For a long time, I thought of myself primarily as a designer. I understood pattern, colour, composition and how an image could work within a space or on a product. Design taught me discipline and gave me a visual language, but somewhere along the way I began to realise that there was something underneath it that I hadn’t been allowing myself to explore. I wasn’t simply interested in making things look good. I wanted to express something, question something, create an emotional response. I wanted the work to come from somewhere more personal.

Looking back, I sometimes wish I had made that transition from design to art much sooner. Perhaps I was too focused on what a designer was supposed to produce, rather than asking what I wanted to say. But I don’t see those years as wasted now. They gave me the tools I am bringing into my art today. Pattern, repetition, colour, structure and composition are still deeply embedded in how I see. The difference is that now they don’t have to serve a product or a brief. They can serve an idea. Much of the work I am creating now explores the relationship between people and nature, and the tension, beauty and vulnerability that exists between the two. I took the long way to art, but perhaps I needed that journey to understand why I was making it in the first place.