Exhibition view, A Spiral Shell, Maureen Paley, London, 2021, photos: Mark Blower

Chioma Ebinama (b. 1988, Maryland, USA and lives and works in Athens, Greece) is a Nigerian-American artist who is interested in how animism, mythology, and precolonial philosophies present a space to articulate a vision of freedom outside of Western social and political paradigms.

Raised in the United States by Nigerian Christian immigrants, Ebinama is drawn to the aesthetic of formalised religion for its potential to celebrate inner life. As she seeks to create new mythologies for the African Diaspora, her work is influenced by a myriad of sources, from West African cosmology to folk art of the global South, to the visual language of Western religion and Eastern spiritual traditions.

The Empress, 2021, watercolour and sumi ink on paper, 100 × 140 cm

Exhibition view, A Spiral Shell, Maureen Paley, London, 2021

Exhibition view, A Spiral Shell, Maureen Paley, London, 2021

The Tower, 2021, watercolour, sumi ink, coffee on paper, 100 x 140 cm

An exquisite yam, 2021, watercolour, sumi ink and coffee on paper, 67.5 × 94 cm

exhibition view, A Spiral Shell, Maureen Paley, London, 2021

Recent solo exhibitions include mud & butterflies, Catinca Tabacaru, Bucharest, 2021; Now I only believe in…love, Fortnight Institute in New York, Leave the thorns and take the rose, The Breeder Gallery, Athens, 2020 and Anunu: Notes on the Divine Feminine, Boys’ Quarters Project Space, Port Harcourt, Nigeria, 2019. Selected group shows include Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, 2021 and The Serpent’s Eye, Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne, Rochechouart, France, 2021. Ebinama has recently illustrated a children’s book Emile and the Field, written by Kevin Young, poetry editor of The New Yorker and director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History.

“I am often looking backwards and outside of the West. In a recent article by the Paris Review, writer Sasha Bonet describes collage as a practice of the Black imagination that helps us continue to dream in the face of violence and uncertainty. I really identify with this in terms of my approach to making figures and images.”