A bed is a medium item that, in an art context, can portray an array of different experiences, including sex, love, joy, rest, and sadness. In 1999, Tracey Emin stirred the art world by exhibiting her dishevelled bed for the Turner Prize. The installation, titled simply My Bed (1998), represented four days in the artist’s life where, during a bout of depression, she went without eating or drinking anything but alcohol. For Tracey, using the piece of furniture in her creation chronicled one of the darkest moments in her life, but for British-Nigerian artist Sola Olulode, it signifies something completely different.
Sola has painted Black queer couples in bed for around two years, as part of an ongoing Bed Series (also known as I love Sharing A Bed With You). In “Stitched To You” (2022), a pair wearing blue bonnets with content smiles across their faces sleep peacefully next to each other under floral bedding. Like much of Sola’s work, the piece highlights a moment of happiness and intimacy between a queer Black female couple.
“I’ve been looking at love and relationships in my practice for a while now,” Sola says. The 26-year-old British-Nigerian artist studied Fine Art at the University of Brighton, graduating in 2018. Since then, she says, her focus has been on creating work that feels personal to her, particularly the relationships between Black women and non-binary people.
Sola makes a conscious effort to illustrate a range of romantic dynamics in her paintings. The initial hopeful stages of a couple first falling in love, for example, such as in her hand-pulled screenprint, “Laying in the Grass” (2021), a piece that finds a couple relaxing on greenery next together. She later envisages the couple on a date and sitting down for a picnic; a rare idyllic image of queer existence. “The media often shows the negative side of being queer, and in fact, that’s not our everyday experience,” Sola says. “There’s a lot of beauty.” Her Bed Series is an extension of this idea.
While her work is currently on display at the Sapar Contemporary Gallery in New York, Sola also brought this series to life at 1-54, the international African art fair held at Somerset House in London last month. In it, she placed a large real-life indigo bed in the middle of London gallery Berntson Bhattacharjee’s exhibition space at the fair. She decorated the item with four Black women on the headboard and the outline of two others on the sheets, in a piece titled “Sleeping Deep In the Blue of Your Love” (2022). “This body of work demonstrates the breadth of Sola’s practice, blurring the lines between fine art, textile and sculpture,” India Bhattacharjee, the director of the gallery tells me. “She challenges our preconceived notions of what an oil on canvas should look like.”
But Sola’s work isn’t just about exploring the experiences of Black queer women. She also uses it to probe her Nigerian heritage through her choice of materials, experimenting with methods like the Adire technique, the name given to indigo-dyed cloth made by Yoruba people, where melted wax is used to create striking prints. “I looked a lot at indigo and how Nigerians use resist dyeing to make textiles,” she says, referring to the practise that involves blocking areas of a textile from dye using wax. Although it is often used in Nigerian culture to make patterns, Sola uses it to create the figures in her art. “I like that I am linking [my work] back to a Nigerian art practice,” she adds, “but it still has the Western painting style that I have learned.”
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For Sola, her work is an amalgamation of different parts of her identity. “I like to put a little bit of myself in all of the work,” she says. In the case of her Bed Series, it’s one of the locations she feels most comfortable in. “When people ask ‘What’s your happy place?’, I always think of being asleep in my bed.”
‘Sola Olulode: Could You Be Love’ is on display at the Sapar Contemporary Gallery in New York until 2 December 2022.
Credits
Images courtesy of Sola Olulode