By Osa Mbonu-Amadi, Arts Editor 

Without the creative research works of Chijioke Onuora, the renowned uli art adherent, a significant part of Igbo art tradition called ichi, which was already on the brink of extinction, would have been lost forever like many of its kinds.    

As an undergraduate of art at the University of Nigeria Nsukka, Onuora, in 1986, became converted to ulism, the creative ideology of the Nsukka School. Around that time, Chike Aniakor, a painter and renowned Professor of African art history, gave his students, including Onuora, an ethnographic research assignment which required them to go to their various villages to study art cultures that were becoming extinct.   

So, Onuora went to his village, Adazi-Ani and visited the Adazi-Ani shrines. Adazi-Ani is an Igbo community of the southeastern Nigeria in the present Anambra State. When he got there, he was fascinated to see the dying art objects of Adazi-Ani shrines that bore the ichi marks, and subsequently decided to study it. The result was a copious flow of inspirations from the ichi tradition which synthesized with his already imbibed uli art. 

Chijioke Onuora identifies lines as the basic ingredient in his art: “Lines, which are dots in motion, are central in my studio efforts on mark making,” he says. “At the moment, I am inspired by the lines on the beautifully carved entrance gates into the obu compound, the azu wall panels of the obu house as well as the Ichi lines permanently engraved on the foreheads of prospective Ozo title initiates.

“These influences are very evident in my current studio efforts on mark making, having been exposed to scores of old photographs from archeologists, missionaries and historians on the pre-colonial Igbo carvings, drawings and paintings.

“I improvised the wood workers’ pneumatic tools to reengage some of the cultural ideals as expressed in Igbo proverbs, poetry and songs. In these marked surfaces, old stories are retold to reflect on current social situations, while proffering possible solutions to contemporary issues.

Referencing what Onuora himself and Chikaogwu Kanu called ‘the full use of abstract burnt lines’ in “The art of Chijioke Onuora and the Uli Influence” so visible in his installation work titled Nzuko (Ndi ichie), 2022, Onuora describes different types of lines he employs in his art and their effects: “Thin lines, bold lines, slow and quick lines, curved and straight lines, gentle and rugged lines – in their deployment, express different moods and temperaments. Lines, Lines, Lines, remain the vital forte of my art, be it drawing, sculpture or batik. Welcome to my world of mark making. Welcome to my romance with cultural lines.”

Onuora’s debut solo exhibition

Subsequently, from October 30 to November 19, 2022, the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos will present Chijioke Onuora’s debut solo exhibition titled Chijioke Onuora: Mark Making.

According to the curator, Iheanyi Onwuegbucha of Princeton University, the exhibition examines the artist’s experimentation with drawing in various dimensions, processes, and media. “In this current body of works, Onuora has combined his multiple studio practice in sculpture, painting, batik, and drawing, in exploration of drawing as a performative ritual of mark making.

“He explores the disappearing Igbo tradition of Ichi facial scarifications as a ritualized form of drawing inscribed on the human body. He draws inspiration from the repertoire of linear patterns found in Ichi and carved Igbo wooden screens and door panels.

“Chijioke Onuora (b.1962) is of the third generation of artists from the legendary Nsukka school, whose practices have been influenced by the use of power tools for surface marking introduced to the school by El Anatsui. Going beyond the logic of fragmentation that is fundamental to Anatsui’s work, Onuora employs these power tools on wood surfaces as an extension of his experiments with drawing and interest in classical Igbo art. This interest emerges from the artist’s extensive study of Igbo shrine art he has undertaken since his 1986. Onuora currently teaches drawing and sculpture at the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he lives and works.

Aniakor on Onuora

The theory of appropriation and domestication may be helpful in understanding the creative directions and idioms of our artist/sculptor. He has ranged thematically across the Igbo culture and its art traditions. He had soaked himself in their knowledge and cultivated an abiding cultural intelligibility. He seems to have heeded the words of the philosopher, Mudimbe (1994), when he advised that African philosophers should re-excavate the African past in order to formulate an African episteme and thus escape from western epistemic violence. He knows that in a post-colonial space, the artist has to return to his source, his art and cultural traditions in order to source and reinvent his art modernity. He knows the aesthetic potentials of Àgwà as beautiful surface designs of the bush rabbit, the guinea fowl, the sacred python and partridge. He knows the beauty of the linear abbreviations of the Ìgbò female body art known as Ùlì. He knows that colors when used in their chromatic richness and density can approximate visual theater. He knows also that an artist with a restless creative spirit is endowed with creative mobility and should watch the mask theater by changing one’s position. And that the world is configured by the spiral movement of the snake. And that spiral, curvilinear, circular and other related shapes constitute a form of serpentine writing (Ije ágwō). He had demonstrated his deep knowledge of his cultural environment, translated and reinvented it in his batik works, his sculptures and drawings. His creative imagination is fecund; his visual images resonate and serve as artistic invocations to our collective memory. He has taken us back to our cultural roots, its art and idioms at the level of aesthetic gravitas. He knows that art acquires its visual mobility when it serves as a tool for re-making the world. He knows that what a young man sees standing, the elder sees sitting. His works are ultimately an expression of the metaphor of the eagle on iroko. We raise our ovation for him because of the seamless nature of art in preserving, enriching and transforming human experience. His tools, media and techniques are embedded in the creative emotionalism of his works like the redeeming pulses of silent music. His works, in their aesthetic richness and visual mobility, are driven by the seductive power of creative innovation and fecundity.