Being Otherwise: Notes on Black Feminist Relationality in Sola Olulode’s Where The Ocean Meets The Beach

(Originally published in ARTS.BLACK)

“A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or non-sexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility and women’s strength… Loves the Spirit… Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.”

Alice Walker, “Womanist,” In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983)

Brown limbs melt together, shaping into the bodies’ grooves and surrounded by the blues of the indigo-dyed background. The faint creases and lines are a system of roots, heads cradled in maroon petals. Right arm encircles her neck, left hand rests on the fleshiness where the buttocks meets the thigh. Faces touch as the womxn 1 embrace with eyes and lips closed. Hair is soft, curling black lines. A flower blooming from the scalp. The energy is feminine, existing in the “deeply female and spiritual plane” that theorist and poet Audre Lorde terms the erotic 2. British Nigerian artist Sola Olulode titled the piece Entwined as part of her recent exhibition Where the Ocean Meets the Beach at VO Curations gallery in London.

In my reflection on Olulode’s work, I return to the reading practice laid out by Black feminist theorist and activist Barbara Smith in “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism” (1979), intentionally attending to relationships of sensuality between Black womxn—whether romantic, sexual or otherwise—that are often overlooked in analyses limited by heteronormativity. 3 Smith cites the Radicalesbians manifesto “Woman identified woman”, which gestures towards a broader understanding of lesbian: “What is a lesbian? She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society cares to allow her.” 4 This essay holds space for all the range of expressions of Black womxn’s intimacies 5 and develops alongside visionaries such as Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, M. Jacqui Alexander, June Jordan and Kevin Quashie, drawing from their synergy with Olulode’s work. I situate Olulode’s work within a larger discussion of Black feminist perspectives on intimacy and relationality that are the ways of loving, being with others, and collective consciousness that I learn from most and yearn to see in the world. It is my relationships to Black womxn and femmes that have allowed me to honor my own femme-ininity 6 as a Black queer man, while also reckoning with the fact that my position within masculinity is often predicated on the societal denigration of Black womxnhood. I invite readers to grapple with the intentional work necessary to create a world in which Black womxn and femmes can exist in the richness of their interior lives. 

Through her paintings, Olulode conjures the erotic in an embrace of the feminine with an acute attention to intimacy. She employs the Yoruba resist-dyeing technique Adire 7 following in the histories of womxn in South-Western Nigeria, and treats different parts of the canvas to create the desired colors.  Her attention to the dimensions of Blackness engage it both to denote race and as a structuring racial logic, noting in an interview, “I am also interested in the relationship between Blackness as a colour, and identity.” Her use of blues to depict skin color, as shown in the pieces Entwined and In the Middle, relates to notions of “blue-black” as discussed in art history 8 and African-American culture. The term is used both to characterize the depth of the colors of dark-skin and examine the nuances of Blackness beyond skin tone. It is explored by artists such as David Hammons in Concerto in Black and Blue (2002)and Carrie Mae Weems in “Blue Black Boy” (1997). As Glenn Ligon writes, regarding his exhibition “Blue Black” (2017), “Blue-black is the kind of black where you go, “Black!” 9

Olulode’s brush strokes take on hatching and shading techniques, creating an ethereality to her figures. Her use of melted wax adds texture and structure to the bodies and patterns, their features etched and outlined with bleach. Her hands bring an intimacy to the canvas through dyeing techniques, working and stretching it while covered in indigo and turmeric. Employing charcoal and collage highlights the dimensions of tactility. Olulode’s paintings do not feel heavy handed or over-worked. Their lightness orients me towards my own vulnerability, engendering a softness to my movements and an awareness of my physicality. I follow the breath that animates my body as I move through the room. Tread lightly and do not seek to harm.

Entwined is the first piece I am drawn to in the exhibition in the twelfth floor gallery. I am alone, the sun streaming into the windows, providing an escape from the grey of London. The paintings generate a warmth I rarely find in galleries. “Sometimes I stand by the edge of where the ocean meets the beach and look out into the sea, so I can feel like something that does not have an end.” Olulode draws her show’s title from this line in artist Travis Alabanza’s  poem “The Sea,” in which they connect the freedom to express one’s gender and its possibilities to the vastness of the sea. The poem illustrates the malleable possibilities of gender, or no gender, and the ways Black people inhabit these experiences, making them their own. I both attend to Olulode’s work as a meditation on intimacies between Black womxn and femmes specifically and adamantly believe in Alabanza’s discussion of the expansiveness of gender. 10

Olulode and Alabanza express the spaciousness of the Black diaspora, interlinked by oceans and seas, archipelagos and continents now divided. Olulode’s use of Adire and vivid color schemes of blues and yellows invoke the orishas Yemọja 11 and Ọṣun, 12 protectors of womxn and femmes. 13 The dyeing technique is historically known for incorporating motifs of indigenous and contemporary Yoruba life, such as philosophy and religion. Sitting with her work, my body recalls feelings experienced at a celebration of Ọṣun in Trinidad and Tobago several years before. 14 We sought her presence on the sandy banks where the Salybia river intertwines with the Atlantic Ocean. I lost count of the womxn and femmes mounted by her spirit and entering the waters. What memories lie at the intersection where the ocean meets the beach, where Alabanza’s words wash onto Olulode’s canvas? 15

In the Middle, they dance close together, painted in shades of brown, black, and blue. Each has a different outfit: a green crop top and joggers, a fuschia tube dress. Some womxn have arms raised in the air, others closer to their sides. Legs bent, readying the wining waist movement of the African diaspora. Some hold up cell phones to take selfies. The relationships between the womxn are not explicit, but the energy is collective, embodying what Walker identifies as a sign of womxn’s culture. 34 This concept of womxn’s culture animates the history of Adire dyeing techniques, invoking over a century-long practice of Yoruba Nigerian women working collectively to produce and distribute the cloth. In “Uses of the Erotic” Lorde claims that these connections are a form of consciousness that arise from collective existence: “As a Black lesbian feminist, I have a particular feel-ing, knowledge, and understanding for those sisters with whom I have danced hard, played, or even fought. This deep participation has often been the forerunner for joint concerted actions not possible before (1978:91).” Erotic relationships, imagined broadly, become a catalyst for collective action—a site of possibility. In a studio visit with the art publication boundary, Olulode notes, “my relationships with womxn and femmes are the most important to me in life as they are the people I relate to the most… I want to depict all these different relationships that I witness.” Olulode’s portrayal of Black womxn’s culture generates an affective pull that draws me to her work, even in the opacity created through techniques of abstraction in the painting of the figures.

I find beauty in the absence of specificity of facial or bodily features in Olulode’s pieces. Though her work is inspired by personal experiences, there is subtle abstraction in the simpler human forms, producing an obscurity that allows them to translate beyond the limits of specificity and foster an empathic engagement that resonates between viewer and the image. Philosopher Édouard Glissant considers opacity integral to a poetics of relation that holds space for difference. Opacity may breed obscurity through the inability to demand transparency, but understanding the other does not necessitate reduction. I participate in Olulode’s paintings precisely because I cannot know the figures in their entirety; rather, I come to them and create meaning through my own experiences of the world. Her engagement of opacity moves me in ways similar to several other Black womxn artists, including Chicago-based Brittney Leanne Williams, 35 London-based Davinia-Ann Robinson, 36 and Trinidad and Tobago-based Brianna McCarthy. 37 Each interrogates the boundaries of the body, desire, and intimacy in ways that center Black womxn and femme subjectivity, employing abstraction while wrestling with the materiality of Black embodiment.