"City Lessons" Artwork

Deolu Femi (b. 1999) is a Nigerian paper artist whose practice explores memory, childhood, endurance, and the processes through which identity is formed and carried over time. Working primarily with paper, Femi employs cutting, folding, layering, and accumulation as both material strategy and conceptual language. These methods mirror the ways personal histories are broken, reconstructed, and held through lived experience.

Rooted in reflections on childhood, vulnerability, and emotional restraint, Femi’s work considers how early experiences leave lasting impressions that extend into adulthood. Rather than narrating these experiences directly, his practice translates them into physical structures, edges that unravel, layers that conceal and reveal, and surfaces shaped by repetition and care. Through this approach, memory becomes something perceptible and spatial, shaped by patience rather than urgency.

Femi’s process is deliberately slow and attentive. He allows forms to emerge gradually, embracing uncertainty and revision as integral to making. This pace reflects his interest in endurance, healing, and the coexistence of fragility and resilience. His work suggests that transformation is not a singular moment but an ongoing negotiation.

Femi holds a B.Tech in Geophysics, a background that informs his sensitivity to structure, accumulation, and processes that unfold gradually over time.

His practice resists spectacle, favoring presence and intimacy instead. The works invite viewers into moments of recognition, encouraging reflection on their own experiences of growth, tenderness, and becoming. By working with paper, an everyday, vulnerable material, Femi honors the labor of survival and the understated ways people carry their histories forward.