A girl, her ears hung with two fat-bottomed pears, gives a thousand-yard stare; a man crawls on the floor, a leviathan conch shell weighing him down; a pair of faceless figures – part-mermaids, part-dervishes – whirl in a gyre of frothing sea foam: this is the dreamworld conjured by Nneka Uzoigwe, a painter whose art is underpinned by magical imaginings.
While she likes to paint from life, Nneka works as much from her mind when creating her visionary pictures. Like waking dreams, they meld the real with the surreal, the concrete with the curious, forcing the viewer to question what they believe they see – whether that’s a knitted piece of fruit or a shell-shaped doorknob.
