Scraps From Mama’s Floor, 2018, Interactive digital installation
Scraps from Mama’s Floor (2018) was commissioned as part of the ART X Prize with Access 2018. This work is a homage to the artist’s mother, whom the artist credits with sewing most of the clothes worn by the artist in her early years. In describing the project,
Artist Statement:
The video collage is a testimony to the work of women and mothers, particularly those who sew. It is specifically about my own mother, who made clothing for me as a child. Then, she always felt larger than life. She was a super being creating out [of] seemingly nothing, ceaselessly. As she made my dresses, I watched her cut away at fabrics and utilize patterns, allowing the leftover scraps to fall to the floor. These scraps I utilized for my own play: wristbands, dolls, clothing, decorations for my room. These leftovers were what inflected my childhood with colour and joy. She was sewing the seeds of imagination and also teaching me through gestures that I too have the capacity to bring forth something from nothing — [that] I can create.
A common theme in the practice of Bolatito Aderemi-Ibitola is the transformation of familiar details by digital means. By this process she reconfigures complexities of memory and relationships in a contemporary context. Her practice often engages performance, GIF images, video and animated photographs, diverse elements that she brings together with an aesthetic that, to a viewer, can manifest just as easily as harmonious as conflicting, or as shifting between the two and creating what she recently described as brash moments of interpolation.
As is the case with her previous projects, this work seeks to actively engage its audience. The collaborative imperative places her work in an unpredictable state of flux. Such works are vulnerable within parameters that restrict the scale, colour palette, material references and algorithms that dictate how movement impacts on the visual. And yet her hand as the artist is neither obscured by these restrictions nor by her choice of media; it is in fact arguable that the opposite is true. Aided by technology, her work explores and presents the notion of infinite possibilities, where each action on the part of the viewer and the subsequent reaction manifested in the visible transformations in the work takes the interaction to unexpected places. Her work may serve to remind her audience that human beings are indeed part of something larger than individual circumstance, and that each action can yield results beyond the control of the individual. And furthermore, that the end, if there is indeed one, may never be experienced by those engaged in the process. In other words, those who pass by her work may never know subsequent iterations, though actions on the part of such persons will have informed the results. Blurring the lines between the virtual and the real, this work invites viewers to question the ways in which reality can transcend the comprehensible, the identifiable and the static. The focus on clothing and attire brings to mind the diverse choices of adornment made in demonstration of personal preference or presentation, an experience to which any audience can relate. And the connection the artist makes to her mother’s actions is a reminder that the residual impact of influences encountered at any point in life may continue to find expression for years to come, an idea ably reinforced by both the visual manifestation and the experience of this work. —