The Return of Peace Advocate
Okechukwu Uwaezuoke
All of a sudden, it’s as though the acrylic on canvas painting teleports the viewer to those years when there was, relatively speaking, peace in the land. Before the 2022 painting, titled “Memories of Liberty,” he palpably senses this quiescence oozing from the depicted rustic scene. And the setting, a street market winding through a less-affluent neighbourhood nestled on a hillside in Abeokuta, could have been any of southwestern Nigeria’s ancient towns with rusty zinc roofs.
This painting, Lara Ige-Jacks explains, was inspired by one of her numerous road trips across Nigeria before her relocation to the UK with the rest of her family. These road trips, she adds, were necessary because she would rather experience the scenes reproduced in her paintings firsthand than rely on photographic and video images.
Similarly, the painting next to it in the exhibition hall of the Victoria Island, Lagos-based Didi Museum, titled “Passage to Ungwan Rimi,” inspires a wistful longing in the observer for those less turbulent years.
Ige-Jacks, last seen on the local exhibition circuit in 2018 as part of the group show titled In and Out of Africa, returns with this solo show, the first since 2005, which she titled A Glimpse. Through the exhibition, which opened on Saturday, December 3 and ended on Friday, December 9, she offers a glimpse into her portfolio, which, in her artist statement, she calls “my portfolio of delightful memories of explorations through home; life in the slums, towns, and cities are places that are no longer safe to explore.”
The 2002 University of Arts, Camberwell College, London MA degree holder in printmaking has hitherto featured in 12 solo and over 60 group exhibitions not only in Nigeria but also in South Africa, Italy, the UK, and the USA. But the just-concluded exhibition is an eloquent testimonial of her painterly skills, which she owes to her training at the Yaba College of Technology, where she graduated as the “Best Overall Student.”
In her trademark impressionistic style, life in the Lagos floating slum of Makoko—as in the paintings “Heart of a Child,” “Fun in the Slums,” “The Catch,” and “Still Thriving”—sparkles with sanguine freshness. Then, there is an obvious geopolitical spread in her documentation of traditional festivals with the paintings “The Durbar Mood,” “The Igue Rhythms,” “The Ofala Rhythms,” and “Peace in the Land.”
When it comes to peace, Ige-Jacks is a tireless peace advocate who has dedicated many of her works to bringing attention to the plight of vulnerable and marginalised children. In 2008, her efforts earned her the “Our Heroes Award,” which is dedicated to community campaigners in London.
An incurable optimist, she tends to see the light at the end of the tunnel even in the most dire scenarios. This explains why a solitary white spot gleams with hope and promise in the midst of other colourful spots representing the coronavirus in her mixed-media abstract painting, titled “The Outbreak 2020.”
This is also why she enthuses, towards the end of her artist statement, that the current bleak scenario in Nigeria is not “hopeless” and adds, “I strongly believe that there is enormous potential in the Nigerian child.”
Indeed, the refreshing attributes of childlikeness seem to glow not only through her paintings depicting children but even through those featuring adults. It is as though the artist’s inner essence, through its nostalgia for the past, yearns for the light and draws strength from it.
