Kildare artist's exhibition looks at impact of ‘small encounters’

NEWBRIDGE-BASED artist Fiyin Oluokun has launched her debut solo exhibition, ‘Family Trees Hang Over Property Lines’, now showing at the Riverbank Arts Centre until 25 October.

Fiyin was a recipient of the 2024 ‘Emerging Visual Artist Bursary Award’ supported by Kildare County Council Arts Service and Riverbank Arts Centre, which allowed her to put the exhibition together.

The series brings together Ms Oluokun’s striking collage works exploring memory, cultural identity, and the subtle gestures that shape human connection, particularly through the Nigerian diaspora in Ireland.

A final-year architecture student at UCD, Ms Oluokun explained how her path into collage emerged.

“We were doing collage as a design tool in college, but I really enjoyed it, so I started doing it on my own outside of architecture,” she explained.

Drawing inspiration from both her architectural training and her love of hip-hop sampling, she approaches collage as a way to remix existing fragments into new, layered meanings.

‘Small Gestures’

Her exhibition centres on the theme of “small encounters,” or everyday moments that carry social, cultural and personal significance.

She said: “I’ve been really interested in very small incidents, like my brother getting a nosebleed or my other brother breaking his arm. At first, I didn’t realise there was a through line in my work, but when I put them together I could see these small gestures say so much about people and how they move through the world.”

This attention to the personal is intertwined with her exploration of cultural identity as a member of the Nigerian diaspora in Ireland.

In one piece, ‘Bent Knees’, Fiyin reflects on Yoruba traditions of greeting elders.

She explained: “In Nigeria, women kneel fully and men lie down, but when people move to Western countries, that practice changes. You still bend your knees a little, but not fully. You’re still maintaining the original culture, but morphing it into something a bit more Westernised.”

Fiyin’s work opens up conversations about the creation of hybrid identities.

Born in Ireland but spending time in Nigeria as a child, she has observed how cultural traditions shift across generations, even within her own family.

“I think because I’ve been living in Ireland my whole life, I was born here, but I spent more time in Nigeria when I was a kid than my brothers have. So I do carry a lot of that with me. But my brothers; they’re Irish boys.”

Though this is her first solo exhibition, Oluokun has previously taken part in pop-up exhibitions in Newbridge and contributed written and visual work to festivals and magazines.

Letting Go

She also writes spoken word poetry, often pairing it with her collages:

“Sometimes I’ll make a collage and then write a poem around it, or vice versa. They usually go together,” she said.

For Fiyin, one of the most rewarding and challenging aspects of this exhibition has been letting go of ownership of the work.

She said: “I like to make art and then I have my own meanings around it, but then I feel like once it’s out there I’ve kind of surrendered ownership a bit. People come in with their own interpretations.”

On Culture Night, Friday, September 19, Fiyin led a guided gallery tour of her exhibition before joining a panel discussion alongside other artists and creatives, and on 16 October, Fiyin will be holding a collage workshop – so if this is something that interests you, make sure to stop by.

Ultimately, Fiyin hopes audiences leave her exhibition paying closer attention to the unnoticed details in everyday life.

“I guess just how people move through the world. There’s so many subtle gestures that I think go unnoticed. And it just says so much,” she said.