Red Earth

For a year Ines Okafor walked with a trowel and a set of jam jars, collecting soil from the edges of the Thames estuary and, on two long visits home, from the red laterite roads outside Lagos. Everything in this room is painted with it.

The ground as colour

Okafor grinds each pigment by hand and binds it with rabbit-skin glue on unprimed linen. The paintings are big, flat and quiet from a distance and full of grit and hesitation up close. Some of the reds are brick; some are iron; one is a single afternoon in Gravesend.

Red Earth is Okafor’s second exhibition at Gesso Art. It is accompanied by a publication with an essay by the curator Ama Mensah.