Ijeoma Ogwuegbu, an artist, who has been battling fibromyalgia since January 2019, will have a two-day exhibition at the White Space, titled, “In Piece: Rewriting the story”.
Presented by Purple Rose Gardening/Heart-By-Ije in partnership with Creative Economy Practice @CcHUB, it is also to feature a showcase of Ogwuegbu’s plants aside from the paintings.
The organisers invite patrons to fall in love with art and nature again at 58 Raymond Njoku Street, Ikoyi, Lagos on December 18 and 19 from noon each day.
Ogwuegbu was diagnosed with fibromyalgia — a condition where one’s brain interprets all stimuli it receives as pain — which made it almost impossible for her to do the things she would have normally loved to do because they required more movement and energy than she could afford.
The condition caused her to switch paths from a successful writing career of 20 years to become an artist last year.
The art, she has said in interviews in the past, was initially to pass time.
Her pieces, which range from two feet to six feet, are mostly acrylic on canvas while exploring other media. Some of these paintings are born from what she thinks are the many layers of the worlds that are not fully understood – and trying to explore what those spaces look and feel like.
The works equally manifest the artist’s feminist ideologies which explore not only the trauma that women go through but also having to live with this trauma.