Igi Lola Ayedun

Igi Lola Ayedun works across painting, video, 3D digital sculpture, photography and sound, guided by the cultural and biological potential of colour, above all blue. Her research follows the global routes of indigo, the history of lapis lazuli and the power of minerals, and reclaims these colours as a visual memory that runs through many cultures and long predates European colonisation of the global south. She makes her own canvases from vegan materials, working argan oil, butter paper, corn paste, latex, oil paint, lapis lazuli and indigo into heavily textured surfaces. One series took a digital retinal scan of her own eye as its starting point, carrying the abstract forms of digital topography onto these handmade skins. Ayedun sees the meeting of ancient and contemporary technologies as a spiritual way of carrying African ancestral knowledge into the future.