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By Henry Akubuiro
In visual narrative, artist Oluwafunke Saka brings personalised themes onto the canvas to either serve as inspiration or shared experience. Her works come with quite some bold lines, combining a mixed of painting and drawing either pleasant nostalgia or traumatic experience.
From sojourning through life challenges, to vulnerability, as well as the spirituality of shared encounters, Saka brings creative contents that boost art appreciation. With less emphasis on figurative imageries, the artist applies the total scenery of every theme to be as expressive as possible.
Like most artists, who have the freedom and right of choice of themes, Saka’s subjects come with the two sides to art appreciation. Viewers either see their personal emotion or refresh traumatic experience that they won’t want to reflect on.
Her diversity as regards the medium used include working with acrylic, paper, yarn, wood, and adire. The simplicity of her creative expression can be seen in works such as Lost In Transit, Until My Last Heartbeat, and Rites of Passage, among others. While the artist’s depth of artistic articulation to challenges of life appears attractive, she might be confronted with scientific facts to back up her claims of what could be described as art therapy.
In a multiple of four pieces entitled Lost in Transit, Saka’s paintings note the delicate space between departure and arrival. Either in mental or physical context of transit, the work seems to define transit as uncertain, and that embarking on such journey hangs in the balance of fate. “It draws from my own experiences of navigating life’s interruptions, delays, and unplanned detours,” Saka clarifies the message of the painting.
Again, the artist provides counselling, in visual terms with her depth of narrative as regards resilience to life’s struggles. This time, she appears personal, in another piece titled Until My Last Heartbeat, in which the painting seems to assert visual testament to endurance, vulnerability, and the determination to stay strong despite the weight of life’s scars. In the painting, the artist makes the heart so conspicuous that it represents what she calls “more than an organ; it is a vessel of memory, resilience, and emotional inheritance.”
Between the choice of keeping artist’s personal experience away from the themes in focus, some artists would rather use their art to highlight immediate environment only. For Saka, she has a different choice in her visual narratives of how art is appreciated. The artist often explore the unseen struggles of the mind and spirit, as seen in Until My Last Heartbeat, in which the contents explain the artist’s turning inward to confront the fragile yet unyielding nature of the human condition.
The painting is really loaded with contents that’s subject to curious engagement of viewers, for example in stitched forms and dangling threads that echo wounds, repairs, and the act of restrain, self-control. Such exists in the the textures that speak to the layered experiences that shape everyone, in situations like pain, healing, and hope, among others related life experience.
On every piece of art, the viewers either see personal experience to cherish or dislike. For Saka’s Until My Last Heartbeat, this piece carries personal ongoing dialogue between body and soul, health and survival, the visible and the invisible. More emotional, the painting symbolises assurance to keep breathing, keep loving, keep creating until the last heartbeat.
As an artist in the diaspora, Saka’s trainings in both fine art and pharmacy reflects her resilience of being a Nigerian. With both art and science within her disposal, using the healing knowledge as therapeutic factor of creativity, she sees art as a form of medicine for the heart and soul.
