A conversation with Mishael Oladipo Fapohunda
Mishael: Essential. My practice consists of expressions demonstrated through mixed mediums, but often starting with an image or the imagining of one, used either to pose questions concerning hybrid identities, rights to opacity, lived experiences and perceptions of memory, or to state aesthetically aided observations around lived experiences for the audience to simply ponder upon.
Nepenthes London: Could you explain more about the process behind the prints?
Mishael: Well, they started initially whilst reading the writing of Edouard Glissant. I was particularly engaged with his musings around the ‘rights to opacity,’ and I wanted to encompass this on paper or fabric – eventually. I chose initially to explore both cyanotype, which I’d previously worked with, and another process called anthotype printing. Both methods use organically occurring chemicals to render an image.
After a lot of exploration with these methods, and deciding early on in the process that I wanted to use more varied pigments than the blue associated with cyanotype. I started picking around gardens, farmer's markets, and even the Academy Sculpture garden – originally Copenhagen’s first botanical garden, a couple of hundred years ago. I found the process of gathering these pigments and using large transparencies of my own iteratively created analogue photos to guide the sun’s development of them to be incredibly calming and humbling.
This process, whilst fascinating to me, was also bound to fail. Well, not 'fail', but to fade. The pigments used for the anthotype prints won’t last forever, you see. This is the reason I decided to attempt to mimic the variable transluceny of these images. They're somehow coupled to their status of opacity, and these photogravure prints and ‘ghost prints’ are a celebration of exactly that.
Nepenthes London: Is your photography predominantly portraiture, or are there other subjects that interest you?
Mishael: It’s a variation of things throughout time for me - it really depends on what intrigued me at a particular point in time. People will certainly always catch my eye, though, no doubt,
Nepenthes London: Can you tell us more about growing up in Lagos and whether it informs your photography?
Mishael: We moved to the UK when I was only 4 months old. I’m privileged enough to have had the opportunity to spend time with family for celebrations and also to visit over the years. Lagos, for me, is a city that never fails to offer a conundrum of new and intense experiences on any given day. I think having Lagos in my muscle memory keeps my eye sharp.
Nepenthes London: You now move between Copenhagen and London. Does this have a bearing on your craft?
Mishael: Certainly. It’s expanded my community, as well as my ability to shift pace when necessary and tune into varying cultural nuances. I think having any depth of lived experience with cultural hybridity, whether to a higher or lower degree, provides a sort of poetics in regard to relation or depiction.
Nepenthes London: What was your first experience with photography?
Mishael: Aside from mucking about with my dad's camera (that i definitely wasn't allowed to do) I think it was quite late for me. I used a Nokia 7250 around the age of 14.
Nepenthes London: Has your heritage influenced who you are as an artist? Does it change the lens you see the world through?
Mishael: I think it’s always informed me to look beyond any ‘obvious’ or canonical way of thinking. It's prompted me to do my own research; to make use of the incredible gift of observing, of reading, and of listening some of us have the privilege to possess.
disparate, Opaque - An exhibition by Mishael Oladipo Fapohunda at the Nepenthes London store from 14th-31st December.
