Olu Ogunnaike

Olu Ogunnaike considers trees as repositories of memory within the places and communities in which they grow. He often uses salvaged wood, adopting a tactile approach to probe the material’s inherent potential. In 2013, he began to work with offcuts of wood to develop a handmade version of the industrial sheet material called ‘Oriented Strand Board’ (OSB). Ogunnaike’s panels are carefully built up in layers using compressed offcuts of ebony, walnut, rosewood and mahogany, which would otherwise be discarded.This relational process – of the composite and accumulative nature of our identities – is inextricably linked to community, labour and the transaction of exchange.

Installed in different configurations, these site-responsive works consider the trajectories of people and the spaces they inhabit. As Jo Melvin writes, ‘the species of tree from which Ogunnaike’s OSB is created are motifs of their original territory, revealing a displaced experience of space – or ‘locale’. In this way, the composite identity of these motifs perform a complex metaphor for cultural assimilation, domination, migration, and appropriation.’

Ogunnaike’s silkscreen prints on mirrored steel and handmade paper, crafted by the artist from the pages of deaccessioned library books, are made using charcoal dust, the final material state of wood. The imagery depicts moments of everyday life captured on the artist’s iPhone, from gatherings with friends and architectural details in the city, to landscapes observed while moving through the countryside. In the last stage of the print process, Ogunnaike carefully excavates the image by removing the fragile charcoal dust from the work’s surface. Sometimes upside down or partially obscured, the layered complexity of the image gradually reveals itself to the viewer, while the finish refers to the material cycle of wood as a metaphor for destruction and regeneration.

Bad Manors, commissioned for Bold Tendencies, London in 2024, is a monumental table that speaks to human gathering and communion, from domestic to civil and political assemblies. The structure comprises six large panels, each of which was individually moulded from hoarding once used on construction sites within a square mile of the rooftop, and sourced from a local salvage yard. Cast in oak, willow and birch charcoal powder infused with resin, the panels speak to a process of migration, transformation and renewal endemic to city life. The charcoal finish is reminiscent of ebony, and refers to the material cycle of wood as a metaphor for destruction and regeneration. The panels sit atop a steel base which reference the proportions and architectural steel work of the car park.

Ogunnaike’s site-specific commission for Spike Island featured a monumental curved wall that extended and bisected the existing architecture of the gallery space. The aluminium framework was clad with handmade OSB panels, which were covered with roughly applied mud sourced from the River Avon. Red, green and blue lights were projected on the glossy end of the wall, producing refracted colour-shadows in cyan, magenta, yellow and black: the four ‘process’ colours that can be used to reproduce any colour on the spectrum. The lights created silhouettes of viewers’ movements, and of a series of free-standing contorted metal structures salvaged from a fire at Underfall Yard, a historic boatyard close to the gallery. The wall and metal structures referenced the organic forms that resonate with the traditional craft skills practiced at the boatyard: the curved wall reminiscent of a boat’s hull, and the shelves standing upright like tree trunks, the raw material of boat building.

For his solo exhibition at gb Agency, Ogunnaike created a series of stud walls which interacted with the existing gallery architecture, creating a space within a space and rerouting the visitor’s path, so they encountered the gallery interior from a series of different angles and viewpoints, moving and bending to access the newly created spaces. 

Ogunnaike’s installation addressed systemic hierarchies through his use of materials – incorporating exotic woods, which were used in place of everyday building materials, alongside screws made of precious metals including gold, silver and bronze. In addition, the pages of deaccessioned library books were used to represent the layers of untold stories within contemporary society. Screen printed, laser-cut and physically present, weeds formed a leitmotif throughout the exhibition, serving as a metaphor for the importance of the unwanted and the discarded in the city.

‘For Miettes (Crumbs) at CAPC Bordeaux, Ogunnaike’s first solo exhibition in France, he worked with French pine corresponding to material found in the Lainé warehouse which houses the museum. At the entrance of the gallery, Tools (2021), a corkscrew inserted into the wall of the threshold – as if the space was ready to be uncorked – is a first reference to Bordeaux’s wine industry. Elsewhere, You are here, a monolithic sculpture measuring 2 × 4 m, is on one side made up of a flat surface of metal plate, in which the visitor is reflected. The other side shows a grid composed of numerous strips, taking the form of a wine cabinet. While its body is made of French pine, its interior is composed of various exotic hardwoods that grow in former European colonies. Purposely mixing different kinds of woods, Ogunnaike commemorates the links between Bordeaux’s wine industry and colonial history.

The notion of celebration and gathering is particularly present in Who’s next, a large, 8-metre-long pinewood table supported by legs that repeat the design of the wine rack. Shortly before the opening of the exhibition, the piece was used for a large banquet to which all museum employees were invited. Following this festive meal, the artist burned the surface of the table using the Japanese technique of shou sugi ban to reinforce the durability of the wood and – on a more symbolic level – to conserve the memory of the evening. A thick layer of black–brown dust now covers the piece.’

Ogunnaike’s solo exhibition at Museum Folkwang explored steel as a material, inspired by the regional history of steel and coal production in the Ruhr area. His spatial installation revolved around the question of what it means to stand, rather than sit, at a table that represents a particular social system. In the exhibition space, eighteen chairs, each made of different industrial steel, were placed around an imaginary table. The table – equally mundane and complexly coded – is a symbol of social gathering: it offers a space of possibility for social utopias, the dissolution of hierarchies and the negotiation of new seating arrangements. 

Ogunnaike used the ‘seats’ of the chairs as supports for charcoal silkscreen prints, displayed on the gallery walls, made from photographs of ‘pioneer plants’ taken in the grounds of the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex. Pioneer plants are shrubs and trees that are the first to grow in destroyed and barren environments.

At the entrance to the exhibition space, Ogunnaike mounted a second series of chairs; their surfaces printed with a photograph, made using a UV colour printing process, depicting various plant species in front of the chimneys of the old coking plant at the Zollverein colliery.

Ogunnaike graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2021 with a work entitled The Same Way You Came In? In this virtuoso spatial and architectural intervention into the heart of the Royal Academy he clad one of David Chipperfield’s monumental internal doors with ‘offcuts of colonial hardwood veneers, manually broken up and shredded before being “reformed” into chipboard’. Smoked acacia, smoked aspen, smoked chestnut, Macassar ebony, smoked pomelle eucalyptus, jarrah, smoked larch, Brazilian mahogany, smoked oak, smoked dark-hearted pear, Sapele mahogany, black American walnut, wenge, ziricote and tree sap bio-resin all constituted an address to the complex histories of colonial extraction. As Neal Shasore comments, ‘That process of chipping and binding with resin under intense heat and pressure reifies the hybridity and complexity of our own entanglements with Empire.’

Ogunnaike used the lumber from seven London Plane trees felled on High Street Kensington in 2012. Due to its capacity to absorb pollution, this common hardy species was planted en masse during a time when London was black with the soot of the Industrial Revolution. Now abundant along the capital’s roadsides, London Planes are often treated as disposable organic debris to make room for varying municipal enterprises.

Deemed too characteristically unique to be used for furniture, and commercially unviable due to its long drying periods and laborious cutting processes, London Planes are usually met with the fate of a wood chipper. Machined, sliced and arranged into a herringbone parquet, Ogunnaike used the wood to cover the entire surface of the gallery floor, giving it a rare new lease of life. Embedded into the site’s architecture, the floor invited the presence of people in the space, facilitating the artist’s desire to create situations for togetherness.