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The creative fecundity of “Nsukka School” artists towards inspiring action through climate-focused installation art


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Martins N. Okoro and Ngozi Agujiobi-Odoh
University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria
e-mail: martins.okoro@unn.edu.ng (corresponding author)


AGATHOS, Volume 15, Issue 2 (29): 303-319, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.13950112
© www.agathos-international-review.com CC BY NC 2024


Abstract: Climate change is real and it is a global crisis that needs to be addressed with inspiring artwork. In view of this, the study examines the nature of creative fecundity at the level of creative ideology for select “Nsukka School” artists who through the manipulation of common-place materials sourced from the environment, created artwork that draws attention to climate change, as well as issues bordering our natural environment, particularly in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria where oil wells, tankers, as well as pipelines that spill oil from time to time on farmlands and natural waters. For the study, data was collected from extant literatures and personal communications with the artists. As a qualitative research, the study employed historical, technical, descriptive, and interpretative methods of data illumination and analysis. To back up the points being made, visuals of the artwork have been embedded. The study reveals that these artists as social commentators have conveyed ideas centering on climate change and environmental crisis with unconventional media. At the tapestry level of artistic fecundity, they have exquisitely created enchanting statement pieces, as part of their positive contributions to tackling the exploitation of the natural environment. Undoubtedly, this would inspire other artists, who are interested in these creative initiative and advocacy, since they would widen the scope of their creative imaginations of proffering solutions to tackling mundane issues.


Keywords: climate change, environmental issues, installation art, Nsukka School artists


Introduction

Climate change refers to long-term shift in temperature and weather pattern, caused mainly by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas. Its consequences range from intense droughts, water scarcity, severs fires, rising sea levels, flooding, melting of polar ice, catastrophic storms to declining biodiversity, among others. These affect our health, ability to grow food, housing, safety and work. Global impact of climate change requires urgent need for collective action. In this regard, climate change has been the focus of the COP (Conference of the Parties) held every year since its inauguration in Germany in 1995. It is a convention, where world leaders come together to agree on best ways of addressing the climate crisis such as limiting global climate change, and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. Attempts from scientists while playing important role does not negate the power of art in raising much needed awareness and mobilizing the people. This is because art is a veritable tool for evoking emotions, spurring conversations and creating synegy between people and their immediate environment. Artists play a key role in raising awareness and inspiring action and as such, need maximum support and recognition, so that in so doing, collective actions could be inspired towards the protection of our planet. In view of this, companies and digital art publishers such as the Talenthouse and Art Help have been on the mission to creating a healthier planet and inspiring artists to take action. Art Help is partnering with Talethouse towards inspiring people, particularly artists to pay attention to and take action against climate change. In the same vain, the Prince Claus Fund and the Goethe-Institut are issuing a new call for proposals to support cultural and artistic initiatives to tackling pressing environmental issues around the world. Also, the call for proposal: Cultural and Artistic Responses to Environmental Change, is part of the commitments by Prince Claud Fund and Goette-Institut to support artists who are finding creative ways towards addressing environmental issues and the climate crisis. Because flood, soil erosions, the depletion of the ozone layer, deformation, bush burning, desertification, drought and oil spillage, among others, have become real threats that constantly tear apart the very fabrics of the society, artists have been enjoined to make concerted efforts towards using art to portray these with a view to drawing much needed attention to their ravaging effects. The soul of an artist dies who keeps silent in the face of tragedy (Gbaden 2001).

 It follows from the above that artists have been highlighting the climate crisis, turning their artwork into activism, being fully aware that the parameter for determining social art roles, is its genuine concern for the environment. Climate change and environmental issues have become a creative resource for the artists who trained at the Department of Fine and Applied Arts other wise known internationally as “Nsukka School” which has been described as a revivalist movement that appropriates and promotes traditional Igbo design called uli to raise important questions of identity. For these artists, “materials and cultural environments provide the resources as well as the altar on which this creative ritual assumes corporeal form and soulful essence” (Asogwa et al. 2021, 2). An Igbo fable has it that a story is incomplete without the mention of the tortoise. This is true when writing about Nsukka School, without the mention of El Anatsui, who Professor Sandra Klopper said is one of the critically most acclaimed sculptors working in the contemporary global art world, and “possibly the most relevant living African artist of this time” (Morgan 2016). Anatsui developed the attitude to repurposing and transforming commonplace materials into art and in so doing, articulated a shift in the creative direction in the Nsukka School. He made his students to become aware of the change in global art trends and attune themselves with its varying modes of presentation (Odoh 2011, 30-31). Through his creative tutelage, students have been exposed to cheap materials littered here and there in the environment for creating artwork. Chika Okeke-Agulu unequivocally said that Anatsui cultivated the artistic imagination in students. Some of his students such as Ekene Anikpe, Clement Onyekadi, Uche Onyishi, and Erasmus Onyishi have learnt to “exude creative energy, imagination and spirit of enquiry. Being committed to the idea of constant experimentation and exploration, they often come up with fresh and exciting expression possibilities” (Akabuike, 2023), manipulating common-place materials towards generating visual imageries whose metaphorical import is targeted at articulating the climate change and environmental issues. Becoming aware of the currency in art, they created installation artwork which emphasis space engagement and address climate change and environmental issues in Nigeria.

 In attempting to engage the installation art of the select Nsukka School trained artists, the study used data collected mainly from extant literatures and employed historical, technical, descriptive, and interpretative methods of data analysis to examine one of the various dimensions of creative consciousness and also underscore the kind of inner artistic necessity that propels creative artists at the Nsukka art department.


Visual discourse of climate-focused installation art

The issue of how best to protect the natural environment has engaged critical stakeholders as artists, who have been in the vanguard of curtailing the rate at which the environment is polluted through human activities. In recent decade, climate change and related themes are rising in the art world. Moreover, the role of artworks is increasing substantially due to their potential power for raising awareness and helping to educate a broader public. This is because art can generate social discourse through conveying information about climate change in novel ways (Nurmis 2016). Lee (2021, 3) observes that “climate change art encompasses diverse approaches, including traditional media, installations, performance, art-activism, and social sculpture.” In his own view, Bill Mckibben (2015) emphasizes that for climate change to be effected there is the need to meaningfully engage the other side of our brains that deals with creativity so as to approach problems with our imagination. And to help do this, the artists are best suited. In view of this, the artist Antoine Bertin’s installation “333Hz” explores the global tempo of deforestation. It invites the visitors to listen to the evolving tempo of deforestation around the world. Also, Susie Ibarra and Michele Koppes Water Rhythm tells a story of our entanglements with a changing climate and changing landscapes of our own making. By skillfully integrating science, music and art elements together, Water Rhythm led listners into the full knowledge of how we cannot extricate ourselves from the Earth’s freshwaters. Again, giving climate change a physical form, through her work “The Sewer Soaperie,” Catherine Sarah reacted to Typhoon Haiyan which happened in Philippines in 2013. Another good example is Olafur Eliasson’s “Ice Watch” installation of seven big ice blocks which draws attention to the melting of Ozone layer, caused by climate change.

 El Anatsui’s Offering to the Weather executed at the Zweites Symposium Nordseekuste, Cuxhaven, Germany was an installation/performance art. It was a huge mound of earth on top of which the artist had placed a large black pot he made. In the performance, each of the six people covered themselves with white shawls and carried out rituals to the weather spirits. According to Ottenberg (1997, 178) “it was an excellent example of Anatsui’s ability to innovate; it’s one of his most postmodern works.” Ever since then, this genre as adduced by Oloidi (2003, 7) has been “attracting many acolytes, particularly from his Nsukka environment.” Undoubtedly, the creative sensibilities of Nsukka-trained artists draw from the professional altar of Anatsui’s creative tutelage. And just like Anatsui, artists such as Ekene Anikpe, Clement Onyekadi, Uche Onyishi, and Erasmus Onyishi, among many others, “create artwork that draw from their environment, making use of materials that already existed, whether as objects in the environment or artifacts that have been made and already have had a social life” (Onwuegbucha 2015, 68-9). Lee (2021, 3) noted that “contemporary art stimulates artists to engage the public area as a platform in order to inform a broader audience about ideas and concepts relating to the environment.” Poised to do this, these Nsukka-trained artists lend their voices to the clarion call for information dissemination on climate change and its negative implications, through their artworks created with materials from the environment. For example, Strata (Figure 1), Hood (Figure 2), Transmogrification (Figure 3), Grave Yard (Figure 4), Oil Spillage I (Figure 5), Oil Spillage II, (Figure 6), Receptionists (Figure 7), Dots in Space (Figure 8), Climate Change (Figure 9) and Mushroom (Figure 10) are thought-provoking installation works emanating from the artists’ creative vision towards inspiring action on climate change and environmental issues in Nigeria.

 The Strata (Figure 1) is a pyramidal installation made of a parent triangular structure which in turn, houses nine trangular shapes of the same size, held firmly together with adhesive, of which the artist’s aim is to unify all the triangles as a homogenous unit. For the sake of creating contrast, six of the triangles contain nothing inside of them and the other three at the top, centre and bottom are skillfully filled and arranged with thousands of synthetic straws of different colours of red, green, blue, orange, and yellow, reflecting the soil strata. It is therefore, intended that while all the triangles are separate units, they simultaneously form a homogenous whole. What Anikpe’s references to the pyramidal forms (symbol of ancient Egypt) tend to draw, is an attention to the exploitation of the natural environment that is as old as man’s earliest quest for progress and development (Onuzulike and Obodo, 2012). Onuzulike and Obodo, further write that Anikpe speaks of the strata series as an attempt to “restrawcture” and to conserve the earth’s ecology as well as to check its gradual depletion through erosion and flooding, just like straws are channels of flow and siphonage. Through its bright colours that heighten a feeling of polychrome and optical effects, the artwork serves dual functions of utility and aesthetics.


Okoro

Figure 1: Strata, straw, and glass, 2021. © The artist.


Okoro
Okoro

Figures 2 & 3: Hoods and Transmogrification, aluminum and wire, 2021. © The artist.


In Hoods (Figure 2) and Transmogrification (Figure 3), the artist repurposed hundreds of aluminum beverage cans, using the circular bottom to form his composition. And with copper wires, he tied them together into an installation that delights one’s sensory perception. While the Hoods numbering four installation works of different heights are tied with strings to the ceiling and made to rest on the floor to have or take the posture of cobras that are ready to strike or bite, Transmogrification is an assemblage on the floor. Notice the change in its shape from the flat area to the semi-circle shapes skillful assembled to depict transmogrification. To Transmogrify means to change or distort something; hence this work according to the artist is “a call for human beings to desist from distorting the natural environment” (Ekene Anikpe, personal communication, July, 2021). The shimmering quality of the material, lends them visual tension and optical alignment, especially when installed or exposed to light, thereby creating a sharp and clear outcome. The artworks spell-out deep insight into the artist’s intimate grasp of media, including the creative process and production, to borrow from Aniakor (2015). They show that in the search for intelligibility, art remains the only veritable tool for Anikpe toward engaging and addressing climate change and environmental issues.

 Drawing attention to issues bordering our natural environment, Clement Onyekadi employs a crude method. By skillfully manipulating condemned motor oil/lubricant, newspapers, cellophane sheets, as well as other petrochemical products or related materials, meaning is lend to these installations (Onuzulike & Obodo 2012). His works site-specific installations address the negative effects of oil exploration, particularly on the lives of the entire Niger Delta people of Nigeria. The Niger Delta, located in the Atlantic coast of southern Nigeria is the world’s third largest wetland. It occupies a total land area of 75,000 square kilometers, and it is the world’s second largest delta with a coastline of about 450 km (Awosika 1995; Ukiwo 2009). Niger Delta is composed of 9 out of 36 states in Nigeria, (Abia, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Edo, Ondo, Imo and Rivers), and has 185 out of 774 local government areas. The strategic polito-economic importance of Niger Delta revolves around the fact that nearly all of Nigeria’s proven oil and gas reserves and a total of 159 oil fields and 1481 wells in operation are located in the region (Nwilo & Badejo 2006). Through his works, “he specially examines issues of oil exploration and its attendant problems of resource and waste management, which eventually triggered off resource control in the Niger Delta”(Onuzulike & Obodo 2012, 105). Onyekadi uses his works to draw attention to environmental pollution, especially in the Niger Delta, where oil spillage has been deplorable, without remedy, hence the interrogation by the artists with the instrumentality of art, knowing that “climate change art encompasses diverse approaches, including traditional media, installations, performance, art-activism, and social sculpture” (Lee 2021, 3). David Buckland (2013, 367) argues that “art has the power to move people.” This is true of Onyekadi’s installation entitled Grave Yard (Figure 4) that stirs up some cold feelings in the viewers because of its repulsiveness, scary nature, and the gory sight it presents. The installation shows a graveyard, suggested by low and short ridge-like forms of red earth and pieces of stones. On the graves are standing wooden Christian cross. The immediate cause of the victims’ death is seen in clothes that are soaked in motor oil, serving as epitaph which carries inscriptions on the individual grave of the victims. In the work, the artists rendered a perfect impression to depict the tombs of the victims who died as a result of oil spillage and the resulting environmental pollution in the Niger Delta (Ozioma & Obodo 2012). It is to be noted that even though the installation is ephemeral in nature, it leaves lasting impression of climate-themed art as having the capacity to inpire action long after its creation.


Figure 4: Grave Yard, stones, sands, cloths, and wood, 2022. © The artist.

Okoro

Onyekadi’s oil spillage installation series are good examples of such works that engage the beholder into talking to him or herself. He used empty barrels of oil to metaphorically capture the oil wells, tankers, as well as pipeline spilling oil on farmlands and natural waters. It is a well-known fact that oil spillages destroy the aquatic life and frustrates agricultural activities, which the resultant effects, as well as the far reaching consequences are food shortages (Onuzulike & Obodo 2012).


Okoro
Okoro

Figures 5 & 6: Oil Spillage I & II, drums and sardine tins, variable installation, 2023. © The artist.


Repurposing and transforming empty tins of sardine collected from and around his immediate environment where they are often littered here and there, as a conceptual medium, he suggests the consequences of devastating aquatic life (Onuzulike & Obodo 2012). In the Oil Spillage I & II (Figures 5 and 6), tins of sardine were flattened, bound together and folded a little bit. It is as if they are gushing out of the drums, thereby, depicting everyday oil spillage in the Niger Delta. These installation works are true examples of “endless creative possibilities that the living environment offers in terms of ideas, materials and forms are indeed numerous and demand the attention of the discerning artist” (Odoh 2011, 29) to develop owl’s eye view to turn things around and make lasting artistic statements.

 Noted Odoh (2014, 12), “the life of an artist presupposes a conscious sensitivity to the environment as a potent sources of ideas and materials.” Uche Onyishi, another Nsukka School artist created The Receptionist (Figure 7) out of a log of wood, he sourced from the Nsukka environment to address climate and environmental issues. Using chisel and angle grinder and following the wood’s natural shape, he achieved different incisions of bold forms on it and burnished them to a level of bright sheen in contrast to the dark part of the wood, whose hollow has been pyrographed with an electric flame. It is a free standing piece that stretches its hand - a metaphor for beckoning on humans to desist from indiscriminate cutting of trees which has far-reaching effects because of its disruption of the delicate ecological balance that leads to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, loss of habitat, soil erosion and natural disasters vulnerability. This is increasingly impacting negatively on our environment. Through this artwork, the artist explores ways in which art can contribute in sustaining our environment.


Okoro

Figure 7: Uche Onyishi, The Receptionist, wood, 2023. © The artist


Other of his thought provoking installations include Dot in the Space and Climate Change. Dot in the Space (Figure 8) is “a constellation of ‘dusts’ webbed and balled into an imposing structure of rock and metal and then rolled out to sail in space.

 Meticulously, Onyishi deconstructed nature in what seems to be a calculated articulation. This, he achieved by using natural stones as the earth and metal rods as the iron working which represents technological development and its environmental implication. Here, the earth is depicted as containing holes caused by depletion of ozone layer and its implication for climate changes (Onuzulike & Obodo 2012).

 This outdoor monumental work executed with pieces of laterite stones, lends credence to the fact that “contemporary art stimulates artists to engage the public area as a platform in order to inform a broader audience about ideas and concepts relating to the environment” (Lee 2021, 3).


Figure 8: Dot in the Space stones and iron, 2006. © The artist.

Okoro

It is noted that “the core issues of environmental and climate change revolve around the destruction of man’s natural habitat through his daily activities, especially land use, oil exploration, industrial manufacture, and other developmental programmes and activities that result in deforestation, land and water pollution, and emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere” (Facts about Climate Change, cited in Onuzulike & Obodo 2012).

 On how climate change spurred artistic interventions, Onuzulike & Obodo (2012, 100) argue that:

While such European artists like Heather Ackroyd, Dan Harvey, and others are receiving funds from government as commissions to create public sculptures, and installations that call attention to, as well as raise the much needed awareness to climate change in their individual countries, it appears that what most African countries are overwhelmingly focusing on are issues bordering on economic and political survival. Until lately, perhaps, they have not bothered with what appears to them as ‘academic’ quips represented by climate and environmental change discourses. However, in spite of lack of government or public support, a number of Nigerian artists have not turned a blind eye to the obvious global problem.

Brenthel (2016, 34) is of the view that “climate change art could be interchangeable with expression such as “environmental art “or “ecological art,” in term of dealing with environmental issues.”

 Throwing some items involving non-biodegradable materials into the water is significantly contributing to water pollution. This poses potential health risks to aquatic creatures and human beings who make use of it for survival. In view of this, Uche Onyishi’s Climate Change (Figure 9) which was created out of some fertilizer bags, which were scorched by fire heat and installed in an asymmetric balance of a colourful composition to make statement on climate change and environmental crisis caused by this practice of polluting the waters, as a method of seeking solution and response.


Figure 9: Climate Change, feed bags, 2022. © The artist.

Okoro

Through fabric appropriation, Erasmus Onyishi believes in the anatomy of the medium, in terms of originality which is not absolute but relative. To him, fabrics are design units on their own that when used in a re-contextualized state, it yields an aesthetically charged works.

 With fabrics rolled and wrapped smoothly around different materials like metal, wood, cattle horn, and glass, he created colourful artworks that are visual metaphors, whose conceptual framework is profoundly thought-provoking, without undermining their thematic probing. For example, Mushroom (Figure 10) is an installation involving eight different sizes of umbrellas assembled, and grouped to depict mushrooms. Here the artist explored mushrooms and depicted how human beings attach themselves to the natural environment. He sees the mushroom as a symbol of collective growth because the sprouting mushrooms live alongside the grown ones, showing a perfect example of how people should be socially organized in a given territorial space devoid of environmental degradation. In this way, “public art can be substantial in raising awareness of climate change” (Lee 2021, 15).


Figure 10: Mushroom, fabrics and metal, 2022. © The artist.

Okoro

Conclusion

All over the world, art genres: sculpture, painting, photography and installation are being used by artists to address climate change and environmental issues.

 Nsukka School trained artists at the tapestry level of artistic fecundity have exquisitely created installation artwork on climate change and environmental issues through repurposing objects and creating enchanting statement pieces, as part of their positive contributions to tackling the exploitation of the natural environment, lending credence to Lui et al. (2022, 1) assertion that “climate change is impacting on all aspects of contemporary life and that many artists provide a compelling vision for speculative futures, awakening a creative consciousness using imagined worldviews.”

 The study took a cursory look at the installation artworks of Anthoine Bertins, Olafur Eliasson, Sussie Ibarra, Michele Koppes and El Anatsui to show how art can facilitate the understanding of climate change and environmental issues, before delving into the installation art of select Nsukka School artists such as Ekene Anikpe, Clement Onyekadi, Uche Onyishi, and Erasmus Onyishi whose creative experiments like their teacher, El Anatsui, are seamless in scope and range, inferring that by the seamlessness of their creative imaginations and a fecundity of creative output, they continue to expand the boundaries as they journey through the pathways of creative discovery.

 The study looked at, examined, analyzed and interpreted their installation artworks that are characterized by their visual richness, and stylistic diversity, affirming that “throughout the history of art, the relationship between the artist and the environment accounts for diverse and enduring art statements that define the very essence of existence” (Odoh 2011, 29). The study observes that they are multimedia artists whose creative sensibilities gear towards relying on art to “critically interrogate man’s actions and its resultant consequences within socio-political, economic, cultural and environmental space” (Odoh & Odoh 2021). The study shows that these daunting installation artworks open up new vistas for artists seeking to “intuit space by knowing that there are as many spaces as there are variations in the human condition” (Aniakor 1989, 29), agreeing with Rable-Boshoff (2022, no page number) assertion that “the question of how human beings are to understand their role in creation is of particular interest in our current time of extreme exploitation of the earth and severe environmental degradation.”

 The study reveals that Nsukka artists as social commentators have conveyed ideas centering on climate change and have also factored in environmental sustainability in their artistic production with materials sourced from the environment.


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