Art is Everything!: Cultural Heritage Series

Closed Alter_2014

The Food Culture is part of our cultural heritage. The bare necessity of eating and drinking, mealtimes, preparation, sacrifice…is a culture that is most times over looked as a subject matter. I found myself fascinated with pictures around it. This project has thus far delved into the spiritual as I kept working. Interesting to me was the aesthetics, the staged like platform for preparing meals, the formal and informal spaces where these meals are eaten, who eats them, who distributes them, the sacrificial shrines where these meals are offered, who eats the offering, other ephemerals around it, finding that which lies behind…? .

In Yoruba land as well as other tribes, deities are sacred and different people have different modes of worship to these gods. In Osun state (where a part of this body of work was made) for example, worship days are honored for the god called Olodumare. Others are in form of fraternities and various beliefs. From the series we see pots / calabash which are symbolic in food preparations, eating and sacrifice. They were found at various corners of the Osun-Osogbo groove.

Alters_2014 (2)

Interesting to me is how the simple stage of meal times at home, on the dinning table for example, are represented on the outside, be it at the formal or informal public spaces for eating, the mobile food hawker, or even at the alters like the religious spaces and functions where you have to give an offering by putting it in whatever form of offering bowl or basket in other to receive a reward in future. The journey continues...