I'll Be Your Mirror: Abi Ola

For its next solo show, Kupfer is turning into a living room. Complete with chairs, curtains, lampshade, mirror, flower vase and table, Abi Ola invites us into her private world of patterns and portraits. Through a compulsive use of emojis, traditional West African fabrics, photography and British floral designs, Abi Ola’s works are a collection of personal chapters on identity, self-preservation, familial connections and pictographic forms of communication. Her paintings, textiles and sculptures rely on the relationship between shape and colour, from which she creates complex rhythmic structures drawing on simple, systematically repeated patterns. However, in her case, repetition does not function as a study or a tool used for emphasis or depuration purposes, but as a form of distortion or distraction.

Having to navigate the world from a place of neurodiversity, Abi’s practice reflects her need and desire to welcome people into her private sphere whilst also protecting herself. Her most recent works resort to the repeated use of mirrors and metallic materials. Mirrors are both reflecting and distracting; we look at them as an attempt to decipher the many ways our selves are shaped by internal and external forces, revealing the unavoidable juxtaposition between our self-image and the gaze of others. Her work invites the viewer to engage with her choice of reflective materials as if by saying, in no particular order: don’t look at me, look at you, or don’t look at you, look at me. We see the mirror, and the mirror sees us.