About Amarachi Okafor (Orie)

Discovery

From Nigeria, Amarachi Okafor is a multi-medium artist practising consistently since the early 2000s. Her Sculptures, Paintings, Installations and Art Events speak about a troubled, happy, and responsible society, as she explores and transforms used commonplace material.

Inspired by people (issues of living, human actions) and the everyday; her art-making involves research and coordination, exploring design and architecture - shapes, forms... and the history of things (everyday, mundane items).

She enjoys experimentation and participation, creating singular, quirky artworks about memory in used things.

Amarachi’s artistic training rewarded her with a BA (Painting) in 2002, an MFA (Sculpture) in 2006 (both from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka), and an MA in Curatorial Practice in 2012 from Falmouth University, Cornwall, UK. She has exhibited work and practised, had and shared studio spaces worldwide in Africa, Europe, Asia, the Americas, the Caribbean Islands, and the Middle East.

She was a recipient of the Unesco Aschberg artists’ award in 2007, leading to a residency at Lademoen Kustnerverksteder [LKV] in Trondheim, Norway; Commonwealth Foundation Commonwealth Connections recipient in 2009, which supported her travels for research projects and a collaborative exhibition in Nassau, Bahamas. Other residencies are – Nkd, Norway, Popopstudios, Nassau, The Bahamas.

In 2014, she was awarded the jury prize at the National Art Competition (Nigeria). She has exhibited at Babel Art Space, Norway, Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Wales, Manchester Art Gallery, UK, and the Jogjakarta Biennial, Indonesia. She produces socially engaged participatory public art projects with audiences in galleries and alternative art spaces, a unique endeavour she refers to as relational public art.

At home in Nigeria, she works from the research and production space she initiated in Abuja. Her unique art practice is international and also well-rooted locally.

In her research and documentation interests, she worked in the curatorial department of the National Gallery of Art, Nigeria, as a curatorial assistant, rising to Senior Curator, from 2008 to 2015. Currently, she works from time to time, in collaboration with institutions and projects around the world, promoting and exhibiting work by other artists. She was the Africa Commissioner for the Gangwon Triennial in 2021. She was twice the Curator of the Nigeria national annual youth art festival, LIMCAF, in 2023 and 2024.

Through Paintings, Sculptures, and Installations I transform used items into investigations of history, memory and human action. By stitching and patching, I reconstruct what society has left behind, probing these materials for what they witnessed, hold and reveal about our choices within society.

I work primarily with used materials that I collect or purchase from people in Abuja, Nigeria, where I live and work. Plastic bags, cigarette filters, and handmade paper from local food plants –okra, sugarcane, and banana—, become surfaces for inquiry. These expended materials bear scars of history. Transforming them brings me restoration as I learn the deeper implications of individual choices and societal culture.

My process is physical and inherently meditative. On the sewing machine, I draw lines and shapes, with playful functional and non-functional stitches that give form to my paintings. I perform my marks in specific hand gestures, using my palm and fingers to scoop and lay down paint. This involvement –participation– in deliberate physical action, movement and activity, alongside reconstruction through mending mirror how we seek and piece together meaning from fragmented experiences, and rebuild, within personal and societal turmoil.

The work emerges from reflections on events in my life and others' lives: acts of injustice that cause pain, including our actions against ourselves. Currently, I am exploring the Nigerian plastic carrier bag, sometimes culturally referred to as black, an evidently paltry yet environmentally menacing item. I am probing both its material presence, and its metaphorical potentials for how the ordinary can profoundly impact our environment, our lives and future. In used bags, I investigate containment—examining how and what we bear, carry, harbour, restrain, control within society—and how personal choices reflected in these actions might affect us and in turn, affect the larger society, determining the collective human condition.

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