Earlier this week, we welcomed British-Nigerian artist Oluwasemilore Delano for a six-week residency at G.A.S. Lagos. Based between London and Lagos, Oluwasemilore works across painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, installation, and architecture. Her multidisciplinary practice explores memory, lineage, and Black spatial consciousness, with a particular focus on the figure as both form and a site of perception. Through materials such as charcoal, concrete, oil, and textured black surfaces, she interrogates time, cultural inheritance, and the interplay between personal and communal histories.
During her residency, Oluwasemilore will use this period for both conceptual research and material experimentation. She hopes to engage with the G.A.S. Library and Picton Archive, working with archival materials to generate new critical and historical insights. She also plans to expand her material practice, experimenting with concrete, Jesmonite, metal, and wood, alongside a growing interest in traditional vessels such as Ikoko Irin. Her time will include a brief stay at the G.A.S. Farm House in Ikise, where she will respond to the changing landscape and explore clay-based work. Additionally, she is considering a research trip to Zaria (with logistical support from Adegbola Art Gallery) to visit Professor Jerry Buhari, as well as visits to the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove and Oyo State for further cultural research and documentation.
Oluwasemilore's residency is generously supported by Adegbola Art Gallery. To find out more about supporting G.A.S. Foundation, click here.
What is the current focus of your creative practice?
In recent times, I have been exploring the bodily and immaterial attachment to the African landscape, particularly the space between the ground and the sky, and what self-navigation might mean within it. I have been drawn to the Nigerian landscape, focusing on cows and their seemingly unconscious movement through land as a way of thinking about the space between body and soul, and how we connect to an honest sense of self. Central to my practice is the idea of “instinct” both literal and figurative. I work across oil paint on wood, concrete, and Jesmonite, moving between abstraction and figuration. Instinct becomes a meeting point where material honesty and context guide how each medium is approached, with its own process and logic. This also extends to questions around skin, Blackness, and perception. My practice resists fixed location or medium; what may appear fragmented gradually forms an interwoven structure where multiple narratives coexist and inform one another. This lack of fixed position is not absence but tension, a restlessness shaped by being away from home and by the overlapping voices, memories, and instincts that travel through the work. Within one life, there are many tenses in which we speak, and many selves we create.
What drew you to apply for this residency and how do you think it will inform your wider practice?
I am deeply inspired by the residency’s impact on young artists, both in Nigeria and in the diaspora, and I am truly excited by the opportunity to bridge my heritage and my art practice within a critical and exploratory environment. I was particularly drawn to the residency’s strong research focus. Having a dedicated period of reattachment and experimentation is often the most challenging part of sustaining a practice, and I have developed several ideas and bodies of work that require proximity to Nigeria and access to the kinds of cultural resources that G.A.S. provides.
Rested between slumped shoulders held the moon in waiting, 2025, Oil paint, charcoal, chalk on plywood, 162 x 244 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
Can you give us an insight into how you hope to use the opportunity?
Over the six weeks, I hope to build a solid foundation of research spanning material experimentation and exploration with concrete and metal, while maintaining a consistent painting practice. I am also interested in expanding my research into my great-grandfather I. O. Delano’s book The Soul of Nigeria. In addition, I am eager to begin developing my work with metal and Jesmonite through collaboration with local artisans, as well as through the study of domestic and industrial cooking vessels—specifically Ikoko Irin and traditional sugar kettles. I am interested in rough surfaces and in how figuration can be understood through the absence of the body, instead emerging through residues and marks of labour on these surfaces.
About Oluwasemilore Delano
Oluwasemilore Delano, from Ogun state, Nigeria, is a London,Lagos-based artist whose practice explores memory, lineage, and Black spatial consciousness through drawing and sculpture. Her practice continually returns to the question of what it means to depict the figure, not just as form, but as a site of perception. She is interested in what it means to look, especially when looking is shaped by materials that push back and have their own histories, contexts, and attitudes. Her work engages with materials like charcoal, concrete, oil, and textured black surfaces to interrogate themes of time, self/communal referencing, and cultural inheritance. Delano began her formal art education with a foundation year at the Royal Drawing School, followed by a BA in Architecture at King’s College, University of Cambridge. She later completed an MFA at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, supported by the Black Academic Futures and Penny Freer Scholarships.
Photo of Oluwasemilore. Image courtesy of the artist.
Oluwasemilore residency is generously supported be Adegbola Art Gallery.
