"African Bride" Print

Multidisciplinary London-based artists Mary Osinibi (1983) works with acrylic paints, photography, hand drawn sketches, digital and video. She experiments by combining different mediums and challenging the way we perceive traditional fine art and digital art. A harmony of conflicting states is one of many interpretation of Mary Osinibi's art and techniques; her signature style of paintings built up from multiple layers of applied acrylic paints with a wide variety of hues and shades merged with digital art; the combination of mediums that evokes the notion that not everything is as it appears; it underlines a sense of tension between polar opposites such as past to present, good and evil, right and wrong, subjective and objective. Mary’s work is a form of storytelling, her art uses juxtaposition as the main vehicle to communicate these transitions. For example the dichotomy between two disparate emotions or the paradox of time’s constancy set against the sense that it is forever in a state of flux or change. These themes are used to challenge the way in which we perceive and experience our surroundings and respond to our human emotions. While Mary Osinibi’s work is open to interpretation by the audience, the pieces convey what she feels personally and reflect her own convictions at the point of creating that work. For instance her technique and signature style of her hand drawn illustrations have all been drawn in less than a minute ‘sub-consciously.’ Her aim here is to tell a story that gives insight into her own unintentional thought-process at that particular moment in time. She sees this technique of isolating a creative intention as a re-visioning of the artistic process which allows her to produce what she considers ‘honest’ art-work. Her illustrations tells the stories of everyday local people in her community, from topics like family, politics to religion; illustrated in a quirky, unique and contemporary way.