Professor Frank A. O. Ugiomoh

At the heart of this exhibition is an urgent argument: Ibim Cookey’s work enacts a powerful response to the environmental devastation and historical ruptures of the Niger Delta, using portraiture and material choices as a form of both witness and resistance. By fusing architectural sensibility with meticulously crafted black-and-white imagery against evocative coffee-wash backgrounds, Cookey foregrounds the relationship between land, memory, and resilience.¹

In a region where oil still seeps into children’s playfields, community farmlands and water ways, the ecosystem bears the scars of extraction, Ibim Cookey emerges as a contemporary Nigerian visual artist and architect whose roots are in the Niger Delta.² His renditions are profoundly mimetic and predominantly portray black-and-white subjects. Their graded tones and shades exude the visual strength of images rendered in graphite. His training in architecture imparts tactile and visual qualities that are profoundly architectural. He places his constructed portraits against droll or quaint coffee-wash backgrounds that narrate and contextualise his figures. Before the graphite settles into the grain of paper, against the diluted coffee wash stains the background with its insecure atmosphere, there is already a conceptual scaffolding at work—an indiscernible framework of measure, proportion, and spatial intelligence.

Ibim Cookey trained as an architect at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. As an architect, he learned to think in terms of load-bearing lines and spatial volumes designed for human activity. That background enabled him, as a visual artist, to imbue his compositions with architectural traits and to bring them to bear on the human countenance. His meticulous black-and-white figures, in which each visage emerges with the structural authority of a building and the vulnerability of a ruin, are figurations that the Niger Delta region has come to be associated with.

In Fragments of Negotiation, a rendered face is made visible from the ruins of a shredded paper yet configured as if it is a drapery over the figure’s body. Here, the shredded paper evokes the fragmentation of personal and communal histories in the Niger Delta, while the face rising from these remains calls to mind resilience and the persistence of identity even amid destruction. Other notable objects that give the composition its unique form are a ship, the crest of a harbour, a wooden barrel, and a table telephone piece. The ship and harbour crest allude to the Delta’s past as a hub of trade and colonial incursion, while the wooden barrel serves as a reminder of the oil industry’s omnipresence and the commodification of natural resources. The table telephone hints at communication or perhaps the failures and breakdowns in negotiation and dialogue. The inscriptions on the composition, such as “Niger Delta Trade” and “African Honour,” relate directly to the painting’s title, Fragments of Negotiation, underscoring the ongoing contest between commerce, dignity, and survival in the region. Splatters of red staggered within the composition’s ground of tints and shades of brown washes can be read as traces of violence or wounds, hinting at both past conflicts and ongoing struggle.

On the other hand, Faith and Letters is composed of a seated female figure in the Mona Lisa’s pyramidal composition. The serene, forlorn-looking figure, slightly tilted in pose, both hands crossed and resting on her lap, is draped in a red Elizabethan gown. The red gown may allude to both the burdens of history and the endurance of tradition, linking personal dignity to collective memory. Located, as if appended to the figure’s right arm, is a tied bundle of scripts. This bundle of script symbolises education, advocacy, and the trace of written histories that persist through upheaval. The painting’s ground is composed of tints and shades of brown, and on the left of the figure is a building symbolic of medieval church architecture and its towers. The building typifies early church architecture in southern Nigeria, especially in the Niger Delta, positioning faith and spirituality as sources of continuity. A tall, stele-like pillar at the back of the figure bears signpost inscriptions: “Niger Delta,” “Culture,” “Heritage.” These reinforce the work’s themes of identity and legacy. The church building and the bound documents attached to the figure’s right arm thus address the composition’s theme by tying together the land’s spiritual, cultural, and intellectual inheritance.

The Red Economy corresponds to the above compositions. In another vein, Spills of the Creek and Ties that Bind Us have their blue hue against the dominant brown background of the compositions. The blue, set against earthy browns, may symbolise water as a threatened resource but also as a site of cleansing and hope, while the interplay of these colours highlights the deep connection between land, water, the visage of the blue sky and people in the Niger Delta.

By way of an extended take on Ibim Cookey, it is apt to note that his mimetic precision is not merely technical virtuosity; it is a politics of attention. In an age of the image turn, he slows the eye and works against visual kinetics. The portraits, hyper-attentive and tonally restrained, occupy treated papers where backgrounds are only scantily painted in washed grounds of brown, as though history itself has been partially erased, as Ties that Bind Us and Fragments of Negotiation stand to perception. There, the faint aroma of coffee, drying on paper, lingers in the studio air, anchoring the conceptual in the sensory. Under the hand, the paper fibres roughen as they absorb diluted pigment, leaving an uneven surface where wash meets graphite. These scanty grounds do not function as neutral voids; they are fields of suspension, atmospheres of interruption. What is withheld in a painter’s exuberant application of colour becomes charged in residual images of the composition’s background. Thus, what is minimised in the compositions’ setting reverberates as monumental metaphorical indicators, leading to the artist’s conceptual concerns. Architecture, here, is inverted: the background recedes; the human subject bears the weight of the edifice.

 The stakes of Ibim Cookey’s aesthetic choice are inseparable from the challenge to narratives of the Niger Delta’s ecological space and geography.² The Niger Delta region is doubly inscribed by extractive economies, first palm oil, then crude oil, each inaugurating its own regime of violence, dispossession, and ecological fracture.³ This violence has been both environmental and human: countless oil spills have poisoned the soil, devastated fisheries, and endangered entire communities.⁴ For instance, in George Osodi’s book titled, Delta Nigeria: The Rape of Paradise,⁵ he details incidences of massive environmental degradation in massive oil spill that spewed tens of thousands of barrels of oil into the creeks and farmlands, leaving blackened waters and ruined livelihoods in its wake. The Ogoni land catastrophes is the subject of extensive poetic metaphors in Ken Saro Wiwa’s A Month and A Day (1995), ⁶ and Obari Gomba’s Pearls of the Mangrove (2011). ⁷ In other words, the Niger Delta is not merely a backdrop to Ibim Cookey’s work; it is its submerged foundation. Cookey himself has remarked that “to be from the Delta is to always carry its landscapes and wounds within you. My portraits are not only faces, but testimonies—silent witnesses to what we have lost and what we continue to fight for.” The crisis-ridden histories of oil, from colonial mercantilism to petro-capitalist modernity bereft of an iota of environmental stewardship, haunt the chiaroscuro of his portraits and the overall compositions. Black and white become more than formal decisions; they echo the chromatics of oil and ash, of archival memory and documentary evidence. In the same vein, the tints and shades of brown are derived from coffee wash.

Coffee brown wash accommodates symbolic meaning as it is strategic to colour cohesion in a polychromatic field and allows critical takes to emerge from context: material, historical, geographic, and conceptual. Colours are never innocent, and they are never fixed either. Brown, especially in its coffee register, is compact with semiotic possibilities.⁸

Coffee brown belongs to the earth colour family; hence, its use in these compositions is an insistence on material rootedness. Coffee, as an agricultural commodity, is historically entangled with colonial trade routes, plantation economies, and exploitative labour systems. In a postcolonial context—especially within regions marked by extractive histories such as the Niger Delta —the content and context of this exhibition tie handsomely and evoke economies of extraction. It also symbolises a chromatic echo of commodified landscapes, whether agricultural like palm oil or crude oil, bitumen-dark earth. The label “Oil Rivers,” which identifies the region across the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial eras, is given prominence in brown.

A central theme in Ibim Cookey’s compositions is the interplay of archival memory and temporality. The exhibition deliberately evokes an archival sensibility, positioning the works as acts of recall that connect present realities in the Niger Delta to a sedimented, visible history. Coffee-brown registers, considered sepia-adjacent, recall the appearance of early photography and the visual codes of stored memory.⁹ In this way, Cookey’s art suggests that contemporary moments are always filtered through the lens of what has come before. Brown here is not only a colour but a metaphor for the passage of time, evoking aged paper, oxidised surfaces, and weathered walls. According to the artist, he consciously aims to simulate an archival resonance in his current works, reinforcing a sense of lived, layered history. At the same time, he is acutely aware of how the colour brown can absorb and contain meaning. Within his compositions, even the dominant reds and blues—their expressive and expansive energies—become subdued by the pervasive brown, a hue produced from all three primaries and tending toward neutral grey. ¹⁰ This muting effect renders brown contemplative and sombre. In the context of the Niger Delta, brown symbolises the subdued yet persistent weight of unresolved histories.

Regarding anti-spectacular ethics, Aimi Atikah Roslan et al. ¹¹ posit that brown colour resists flamboyance. Unlike painting compositions inundated by chromatic excess, a coffee-brown dominance can signify restraint—an ethical refusal of spectacle. It foregrounds drawing, tone, and form over decorative colourism. In such a case, brown becomes a methodological choice: seriousness over seduction. In sum, coffee-brown tints and shades can signify land, labour, memory, temporality, endurance, or anti-spectacular discipline. But their symbolic force depends on repetition and relationality, or the way hue interacts with subject matter, geography, and the artist’s conceptual commitments. Colour in isolation is sensation; colour in an œuvre is argument.

In this exhibition, the Niger Delta refutes rendition as spectacle but as an ecological condition that is in constant dialogue to remediate its raped and brutalised past and a present that remains unrelenting in an abusive relationship with governing agencies.¹² The scantily painted grounds recall denuded landscapes and oil-slicked waters, yet they refuse literal depiction. ¹³ Instead, the human face becomes the primary site of inscription—where environmental degradation, political neglect, and historical contestation are sedimented in the gaze, the wrinkles, and the skin. Ibim Cookey, the architect/visual-artist, constructs a counter-archive: a gallery of presences that stand against erasure.¹² In other words, to move from architecture to portraiture is not to abandon structure but to relocate it. Ibim Cookey’s work asks: What does it mean to build when the land itself has been unbuilt? What does it mean to draw carefully in a region historically rendered carelessly by extraction? In these black-and-white visages, framed by atmospheres of near-absence, the Niger Delta is reconstituted—not as a resource frontier, but as human terrain. While Cookey’s approach is marked by restraint and focus on human presence, it stands in contrast to other contemporary Nigerian artists who address ecological trauma through more literal or documentary strategies, such as Bright Ugochukwu Eke, whose installations use water and contaminants to evoke the polluted Delta, or George Osodi, whose photographs document the devastation and the people impacted by oil spills. Unlike Eke’s immersive installations or Osodi’s photographic reportage, Cookey transforms the conventions of portraiture and architectural drawing into meditation on endurance and presence. This subtlety aligns him with artists like El Anatsui, who uses material transformation to comment on the impact of extraction, yet Cookey’s restraint and focus on the face situate his work within a broader art historical debate on witnessing versus spectacle and the ethics of representing damaged landscapes.

Notes.

1. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environment of the Poor, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass. and London, England, 2011.
2. Nnamdi, B. S., Gomba, O and Ugiomoh, F. A. O., “Environmental Challenges and Eco- Aesthetics in Nigeria’s Niger Delta,” Third Text, 27/1, (2013) 67-75.
3. James Rice, Slow Violence and the Challenges of Environment, Environmental Justice, Vol. 9, no. 6, 2016, pp 1-5. DOI: 10.1089/env.2016.0019.
4. Frank A. O.Ugiomoh. “The Niger Delta Seen through George Osodi’s Lens” in Delta Nigeria: The Rape of Paradise, George Osodi, Great Britain: Trolley Books, 2011. pp. 6-11.
5. George Osodi, Delta Nigeria: The Rape of Paradise, Great Britain: Trolley Books, 2011
6. Ken Saro Wiwa, A Month and A Day: The Detension Diary, Channel Islands: Safari Books, 1995
7. Obari Gomba, Pearls of the Mangrove, Port Harcourt: Newson and Dexter, 2011.
8. St. Clair Kassia. The Secret Lives of Colour. London John Murray, 2016
9. Tom Loveday, Colour Explaned, Artist’s Catalogue Essay, originally presented at the College Art Association Conference, New York City, 2015.
10. St. Clair Kassia, Ibid
11. Aimi Atikah Roslan, Nurul Shima Tharuddin, and Nizar Nazrim, “The Psychology of Grey in Painting Backgrounds, Ideology Journal, vol. 7, no 2, 2022, pp. 1- 7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.24191/ideology.v712.385.
12. Frank A. O. Ugiomoh, Pale Reflections and Fables of Life: George Osodi’s Real People of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, Camera Austria International, 2009 No. 106, pp23-34.
13. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence, Neo Liberalism and the Environmental Picturesque, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, 13 (2008).