Shadow Selves: Tobi Alexandra Falade Interview

As a curator and artist, Autograph’s Bindi Vora is interested in how photography can coalesce with painting, collage and sculpture – and what the creative possibilities are when mediums collide.

It’s a question shared by young, Nigerian-British artist Tobi Alexandra Falade, whose work skilfully combines artistic mediums and techniques to explore ideas of home, migration and heritage. Using her family album as both texture and motif, photographs in Falade’s practice bridge the past and present, Nigeria and the UK, and provide a means to represent her shadow self.

A recent graduate – Falade was awarded her Bachelor’s degree in 2019 from Wimbledon College of Arts – she has already been awarded the 2020 Hottinger Prize for Excellence, a studio scholarship at the Koppel Project Campus, and co-founded Platform Black to highlight the work of Black creatives.

Vora recently caught up with the artist for an interview, the latest in our series with emerging practitioners.

Bindi Vora:  I first saw your work during your graduation exhibition at Wimbledon College of Art, and was drawn to how you combine photography and painting, and how you use those textures to create narratives that resonate with notions of home and belonging. Why are photographs important to the visual language and reading in your paintings?

Tobi Alexandra Falade: Photographs are often where my work begins, they provide a reference to paint from, and are where a lot of my inspiration originates. My family have numerous albums that share photographs of my parent’s wedding, my earliest birthdays, school sports days and parties with my family friends. These snapshots reflect a particular time, depicting my childhood growing up in Nigeria. Looking through these albums, I almost feel transported back to that time and those moments, and this same feeling is what I want to evoke in my paintings – nostalgia, happiness and warmth.

In my practice, I’ve been investigating and researching different ways to apply photographs straight onto the canvas, directly next to the brush strokes. This methodology reflects how both mediums – photography and painting – have influenced me, and can sit in parallel with one another.

Mirror Me (2018-19) was the first work I realised with this technique, an oil painting with a silk screen-print in the top left corner. However, the process of creating this painting started some time before. Since my first year at University I had been working to transform a selection of my family photographs into single colour screen prints, but felt the result didn’t show the photographs in a ‘true’ way – it looked very pop art instead. Then, during my final year, I saw some beautiful CMYK screen prints of an old photograph my artist friend Annie-Marie Akussah had created. I loved the the realness of the image, and realised that with a layered, four colour process I could achieve the effect I wanted. I began to experiment with the printing process, using a favourite photograph that appears as a motif throughout my work: an image of my Dad and I in one of my primary schools in Nigeria, in which I’m wearing traditional Yoruba gele (headtie), iro (wrapper) and buba (blouse).

While creating Mirror Me, I felt the work was missing something in the beige-yellow hue of the background, and I decided to try to screen print that photograph straight onto the canvas, a reference to what I call my ‘shadow self’. I was hesitant, as several months prior a print technician had told me that it was nearly impossible and I shouldn’t try it! Although I was filled with trepidation it turned out really great, and allowed the screen printed photograph and the painting to share the same space, building this beautiful relationship between the past and the present.

Bindi Vora: From a young age, you’ve moved a number of times, from Nigeria at 7 and throughout the UK during your formative years. It feels like this journey and migration in your life has offered your work a sense of a hybrid identity, drawing on your Yoruba heritage. You’ve described this element of your identity as your ‘shadow self’, which I find intriguing – could you explain more what you mean by this?

Tobi Alexandra Falade: My lived experiences across varied cities both in Nigeria and the UK have been exciting, but also problematic. I have a difficult time explaining where I’m from to people and why I don’t have a scouse accent even though I have actually lived in Liverpool for most of my life. This movement has influenced my practice and the art I make. The processes to create my work – placing different images next to each other to build a narrative and tell a story – it’s a way for all my different selves to be together and live in one place.

The term shadow selves came out of a journaling session, brainstorming words and phrases as titles for potential works. This activity then turned into writing poetry and I wrote the poem below, Alternate Histories, Present Realities.

In 2017, I created Shadow Selves, an oil painting of collaged London landscapes. There are no figures or human representations in this work; the only sign of life is a large glass tower block reflecting the blue sky. With the collage elements, there are numerous false reflections in the small pond that you see towards the bottom of the painting, reflecting an idea of identity being transmuted and dispersed in multiple places.

Interestingly, I later heard the term again in the American horror film Us. It opens with Lupita Nyong'o’s character entering a funhouse, and she encounters doppelgängers of herself in the hall of mirrors – her shadow selves.