By Edozie Udeze
DEBORAH Segun is an artist who knows her worth, always on the move to discover new experiments and forms. At the moment, she is exhibiting at the Temple Muse Gallery, Lagos, with the title of her outing as being free. The show is put together by SMO art headed by Sandra Mbanefo Obiago.
Segun is widely known as a multidisciplinary artist, based in Lagos. In the main, her works revolve around a mix between cubism and abstraction. Through this, she pays maximum attention to detail. At times also, Segun’s works tilt towards unconventional medium in terms of figurative images, portraiture and forms.
In her works, there is a way she looks at a definite form to give her works their uniqueness. In her love for definite portraitures, she inadvertently dwells on human sensibilities. All these emerge from her personal experiences as a woman, her background and personal observations in a society peopled by all sorts of people.
So, in her way, she uses broad and bright colours to recapture these essences. When she experiments, Segun ensures that she produces unique, good shaped, peculiar forms and spectacular styles. Sometimes through these works, she endeavours to exaggerate some of the social norms of womanhood, how the girl-child is treated and so on. When this is done, you obviously see her works bristling with deeper effects on her subject matters, on her areas of interest.
There is this way in which her works confront or if you like, being a ploy to bring reality, whether ugly or beautiful, to the fore. Most of the figures at Temple Muse show deeper images of her clime; images that come in graphics, in illustrations to incorporate the fragments and exaggerated shapes and forms. These images really give her and her art the desired attention, making her appear too committed to be shallow.
She obtained a degree in Fashion Designs at the Polimoda Institute of Fashion Designs and Marketing in Florence, Italy in 2017. While in school, her attention was focused on using fashion to produce deep clothing style never equaled by any. This way, she ended up creating conceptual and sculpting wearable pieces. In other words, sculpting is also part of her uniqueness as an artist. She sees both designs and fashion and sculpting as one and same.
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She said in her artist statement: “In creating these works, I focused on the various transitions and temporary phases in my life, self-hate to self-acceptance. These illustrations serve as a visual representative of how I am constantly redefining myself over time. Growing up in an environment surrounded by people that imposed their own ideologies on me, whether damaging or not, they had a direct or indirect effect on how I approached life.
“Living with different people in different countries pushed me to a point of critical self reflection as I was forced to adapt other ways of life and in turn I had to pick up aspects from each space I was in that I felt made me whole, all the while still allowing myself the option of change”.
She has been involved in a couple of group exhibitions in different parts of the world. This solo outing will further redefine her art, her style and messages. Some of her works include: heat wave, I only drink with straw, shadows during sunset, secret admirer, it’s all good, don’t feed the birds and more. Therefore being free celebrates diverse bodies of women through shape, colour, portraiture and narrative and so on.
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