Abraham Babajide Cole

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

Artist Statement My practice begins with the body as an archaeological site: a place where memory, movement, ancestry and lived experience accumulate in layers. Working across painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, I explore what the body carries when it moves between places, cultures and histories, and how those experiences become embedded materially and psychologically. I work with charcoal, clay, beeswax, pigment, fibre, paper and other organic materials because of their capacity to hold traces of touch, labour, transformation and time. Materials are not simply a means of making an image; they become part of the meaning of the work. Drawing from Yoruba cosmology, personal memory and research into migration, landscape and material histories, I construct fragmented figures, vessels and environments that move between the bodily and the architectural, the intimate and the ancestral. Increasingly, I am interested in the body as both archive and landscape: something continually rewritten by the spaces it enters. Through this, my work considers belonging not as a fixed identity, but as an ongoing process of remembering, becoming and carrying elsewhere within us.

Artwork