Olu Ogunnaike
b. 1986, United Kingdom
Olu Ogunnaike (b. 1986, London, UK) takes trees as repositories of memory within the places and communities where they grow, to cite wood as a marker of possible encounters: between past and present; between people and the spaces they inhabit. Ogunnaike is interested in the parallels that can be drawn between humans and trees, tracing the moment a tree is uprooted from one geographical setting and placed in another, where it might be transformed. This story – of the composite and accumulative nature of our identities – is inextricably linked to community, labour and the transaction of exchange.