How do we celebrate our heritage and culture? How do we remain true to the values of our ancestors, while creating a life of our own in a different country? This is something everyone who migrates to another country or is born to parents who moved from another country struggles with. This celebration is at the heart of Temitope Ogunseitan’s art, known as TP4STYLE.
He presented three works at a recent exhibition at W3 gallery in London. His work ‘Dudu’ celebrates the strength of black womanhood and honours his West African heritage. Surrounded by fruits, she symbolises nourishment and the vitality of life, as well as the cultural heritage that passes down through generations, often from mothers to their sons and daughters.
While in this work, the fruits are freshly cut and harvested, I’m reminded of the Dutch vanitas paintings that use fruit to remind us that life is fleeting. After all, fruit only remains fresh for a short time before it rots. While they took a different approach to the digital painting of TP4STYLE, both remind us that we should seize the day and live the life we want, as it will pass all too quickly, and if we waste it on things that don’t make us happy, then we will only regret it once it’s too late.
Returning to the work in the show, I was particularly drawn to the muscular man with a rose for his head, titled ‘Okunrin’, meaning man in Yoruba. For me, this work addresses the question being asked worldwide about what it means to be a man or a woman today. It’s said that we’re living through a crisis of masculinity where men aren’t sure of their place in a world that’s slowly edging towards equality.
Yet there’s also a toxic pushback from the ‘manosphere’ promoting an outdated view of masculine dominance that has no place in the world today, and presents a significant threat to women worldwide. In this work, I see recognition that masculinity also comes from being tender and caring, and from using those muscles to help and protect others.
The use of flowers as a motif also resonated with me. They have long been associated with femininity; while most plants have both male and female reproductive organs, they are gendered only by societal norms. Men present women with flowers in romantic overtures, but it’s seldom the other way around, nor when men are meeting other men. Masculinity can be about smelling the roses and embracing the beauty of the natural world.
The floral motif carries over to the woman in the striking yellow suit with a flower over her ear and another on her lapel. The title of the work, ‘Orisa’, references the West African deities and, in this case, the deity Osun, associated with fertility. She is a giver of life and sits neatly between the other two works. While Osun is female, many orisa sit outside Western gender norms and in them I see a call to embrace all people, however they choose to present themselves.
We can see clear links between these three works and the artist’s wider practice, where he works with photography, sustainable fashion, textile design, and illustration. Throughout this practice, his work centres on embracing and celebrating different identities, combining his West African heritage with his experience living in the UK, to build his unique interdisciplinary style.
More information about the artist may be found on his Instagram and website.
