Ozioma Onuzulike

Ozioma Onuzulike (b. 1972, Achi, Enugu State, Nigeria) lives and works in Enugu State, Nigeria. A ceramics artist, renowned poet, and a leading figure in the contemporary ceramic art scene in Africa, Ozioma Onuzulike’s works directly address challenges that are not only historical and contemporary to Africa but also the world over with regard to colonialism, migration, and global warming.

In his Palm Kernel Shell Beads series, Onuzulike reflects on the historical use of beads as items of commercial exchange for slaves in Africa by European merchants. Onuzulike uses local clays to recreate palm kernel shells into beads and inlays them with recycled glass and ash glazes. He uses these new beads to weave textile structures that remind one, not of the slave trade era, but instead of Africa’s prestigious cloths like the Akwaete of the Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria, the Kente of Ghana, and even the Aso-Oke of the Yoruba people of Southwestern Nigeria. Commemorated in ceramic, we are reminded of these textiles’ history in the West African weaving tradition and their political and cultural standing.

The production process of Onuzulike’s Yam series – pounding, kneading, cutting, firing, perforating, and at times, burning the yams – highlights the violence that we inflict on the earth. In this collection of work, suggestive textures, hollows, and recycled glasses enhance the visual perception of rotting, that is, the manner in which yams deteriorate or perish when they are not properly cared for on the farms and when grown in adverse climate conditions such as lack, or much, of rainfall and rising temperatures. In Chainmail, Onuzulike’s most recent series, earlier conceptual and technical elements intersect. The artist combines iron oxide with other colorants in the making of thousands of terracotta pieces, providing color and nuances of age. The formal structures seen in the Chainmail series tend to allude to how what were historically slave chains in the past have been transformed into graceful armors by true African nationalists.

Onuzulike graduated First Class from the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he is currently professor of ceramic art and African art history, and Director of the University’s Institute of African Studies. Among solo exhibitions, Seed Yams of Our Land was held at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Lagos, Nigeria, in 2019, along with a presentation of his poetry collection of the same title also published by the CCA. Moreover, his works were included in the exhibition held at the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK, arising from the [Re:]Entanglements Research Project led by Professor Paul Basu. Onuzulike is a fellow of the Civitella Ranieri Centre, Umbertide, Perugia, Italy, where he completed a residency under the UNESCO-ASCHBERG Bursary for Artists. Additionally, he is a 2011 recipient of the African Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship Award of the America Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and 2010 Leventis Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of London Centre of African Studies, SOAS; and an alumnus of the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, USA. His work is in the collection of the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Lagos, Nigeria; Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK; Princeton University Museum, Princeton, New Jersey, USA; The Design Museum, Munich, Germany; Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art, Peekskill, New York, USA; Donnersberg Collection, France, among others.