The Shield Series reflects current issues of protest, migration, gendered violence, and the fight for voice under authoritarian regimes. Like the artist's earlier ceramic garments and armour, these shields blur the line between beauty and protection. They pose: What do we defend? Who is guarded? And at what expense?
A “Fragile Strength”: Ozioma Onuzulike’s Ceramic Shields
To create his “shields,” the Nsukka, Nigeria-based artist and art historian Ozioma Onuzulike uses copper wire to weave hundreds of glazed ceramic beads and lace-imprinted ceramic buttons into dazzling wall hangings. Some of the ceramic beads have been fired with an ash glaze and iron oxide, while others were inlaid with recycled glass before firing to achieve a geode-like appearance. The beads were formed from stoneware and earthenware in palm kernel molds and thus refer to the oil palm, a tree indigenous to West Africa, and to the legacy of colonial-era resource extraction in Nigeria. Oil palm kernels can be processed to produce palm oil, an important global commodity that became controlled in the region by Great Britain in the late nineteenth century through colonial networks. Some of the artist’s shields also include beads made from found dried palm kernels, offering a material relationship to historical, traditions-based African arts, which often employ and transform natural materials, acknowledging their inherent power.
By fashioning in clay, a tool—the shield—meant to provide protection on the metaphorical battlefield, Onuzulike exploits what he calls the material’s “fragile strength,” to gesture towards the precarious realities of the postcolonial condition. Onuzulike’s Shield Series, like his earlier ceramic garments, refers to the colonial trade in palm oil to comment upon its ramifications on the environment in Nigeria today. The differently glazed beads and buttons provide the artist with a varied visual vocabulary with which to experiment with patterns that evoke textiles, chainmail, lace, and other dress traditions that resonate with complex histories of trade, protection, prestige, and communal and familial continuity in Nigeria. Throughout his practice, the artist deftly explores the connection between the colonial history of extraction in Nigeria and contemporary political corruption. Onuzulike reminds us that colonial histories remain unfinished.
Ozioma Onuzulike is a professor of ceramics and of art and design history and, until recently, director of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he received in 1996 the first degree in ceramics awarded by the institution. At Nsukka, his practice was influenced by the legacy of the professors and artists Uche Okeke (1933–2016) and El Anatsui (born 1944) and their engagement with indigenous aesthetic traditions in their work. Onuzulike is deeply invested in exploring the aesthetic and symbolic nature of clay. His labor-intensive process takes the manipulation of clay, through pounding, crushing, hammering, wedging, grinding, and cutting, as a metaphor for the violence associated with resource exploration, exploitation, and control in colonial and postcolonial Africa.
Text by Perrin M. Lathrop, PhD in Art & Archaeology and African American Studies
