Category: Commentary

As you have learned from my previous posts on my Reclamation series, I was sent over alone from Nigeria to Kent when I was 4½. My father was a product of the African generation who were raised to romanticise England. I rarely saw my parents until I was 15 years old when my parents eventually came to live here. Correspondence home was my lifeline to a world that gradually became unfamiliar. At first the letters were read to me but then I was able to get a respect for the written word and the ceremonies surrounding it.

Letter writing has been all but lost in our generation. While I am not opposed to messages of 140 characters or less, there is something deeply personal and powerful about a letter that cannot be conveyed in short bursts of communication.

I know that I am in danger of sounding terribly old, but I still enjoy getting a letter especially a handwritten letter – in the mail. You can’t ignore a letter – they impose themselves on you in way an email can’t. You can scroll past a message in a crowded inbox but something that lands on the mat or is handed to you is physically intrusive and demands attention, even if only to remove it from view, and it is a concrete reminder of a person or subject. As Tom Hanks wrote in his recent homage to typewriters; ‘no one ever chucks anything type written into the trash after just one reading. Emails? I delete most before I see the electronic signature’. Even the act of disposing of a letter takes effort and demands more engagement than pressing ‘delete’ – recycling or a more theatrical ripping or burning are visibly decisive acts, as irrevocable as they are symbolic. So letters demand engagement on every level.

Once a letter is gone it’s gone. A handwritten letter torn into fragments is not backed up on a giant server – the words of the writer are consigned to oblivion, whether this outcome is desirable or to be regretted later. Sadly, my letters suffered that fate, hence the obliteration in this series. A letter can’t be accidentally forwarded to the whole office and when it arrives it’s in a sealed envelope and unlikely to have been ‘hacked’.

On the other hand, letters can, if deliberately preserved, survive long after their senders and recipients have gone. Letters we write now can form a paper trail back to their writers and intended readers, but their usefulness as windows on the past are perhaps less about the events or actions they document and more about how our forebears expressed ourselves, the language and written conventions of the time. This is in part because letters don’t lend themselves to short cuts, pro forma vocabulary and clichés as much as digital communications do – we don’t draw emojis or use text speak in letters.

I am thrilled and honoured to learn that I am a finalist for the Hollybush Emerging Woman Painter Prize 2022, held at Lauderdale House in Highgate London N6 5HG.  The exhibition will be held from 9th June to 4th July.

The Holly Bush Woman Painter Prize is now the largest painting prize dedicated to women painters in the UK.

This prize is aimed at supporting, encouraging and mentoring emerging women painters. Each year twenty-two artists are chosen for the final of this competition which exhibits in London. From these twenty-two talented women the first prize is awarded to a painter who has demonstrated exceptional potential to become an established professional artist. 

​The exhibition offers a genuine opportunity for emerging women artists to further their career and for art collectors to invest in the future of the art-world’s emerging talent. So what is meant by an emerging artist? It refers to an artist who has not been snapped up by a gallery, does not have an art agent and whose profile in the art market is low, to be emerging.

The organisation strives to champion women artists and try to play a part in correcting the imbalance in the art world. Did you know top London galleries exhibit more work by male artists than female and that their work sells for more than their female counterparts? Women are also under represented in the major roles in the art world and paid less. 

They are here to help change that!

The chosen finalists’s paintings can be seen here, and there is the opportunity for you to vote for your favourite(s).

For the first time in the competition’s history two works by a single artist have been selected for the final. I am delighted that both my pieces were chosen :