I am interested in everyday narratives especially as they intertwine with pop culture. Although, sometimes I pay homage to memory, and what it means to remember, however, I think the past and present converge at the ceremony of time we call today.
I worked on the GRAPHIC TEES collection in late 2018, I find graphic tees fascinating in the sublime way they tell a story, pass a message, retain a memory or even give a kind of psychological details of a person. We live in a country of maxims, adages, and mantras, and sometimes wear them as clothes. In this collection, I explored graphic tees that speak of the irony of the times, pop culture, and the things we cannot say, but let our clothes speak for us.
I have chosen to create these on paper, and with: Ink, Acrylic textile ink, and pen markers because they capture the basic essence of what it means to create fashion. For sometimes unconsciously we wear our art and our voices.
I also question stereotypes and why society drifts towards a certain ideological standpoint that has far-reaching consequences in the long run. I believe Narratives should sometimes have a balance to them. For example, of all the global campaigns to protect and care for the girl child, I find the boy child many times missing in the picture. Boys grow up alone, sometimes unguarded, and continues the circle of crime against themselves and women. The global narratives of Gender are usually one-sided, so I find myself asking questions like “What about boys?” and so on.
Most of these narratives I work on are forked. I like to explore such stories to have a personal understanding that is not influenced by societal constructs, for the world is a widening space, and I am here to explore and document it.
Hillary Uzomba
