Precious Okoyomon’s Creative Destruction
Precious Okoyomon
Cutting and sewing stuffed animals in their Brooklyn apartment or working on-site at arts spaces around the world, artist Precious Okoyomon embraces play and dreaming with a critical edge, exploring questions of freedom, racialization, and the subtle violence of the everyday. The artist’s work ranges from allegorical gardens filled with poisonous flowers, invasive plants, and butterflies to oversized teddy bears in states of undress that reflect tensions between innocence and violence. This short documentary film follows the artist’s unique creative trajectory from early experiences gardening with their grandmother and collecting childhood toys to later creating immersive installations at celebrated arts institutions like the São Paulo Bienal and the Whitney Biennial. “Most of my work is me just thinking through my experiences,” says Okoyomon. “Everything is extremely vulnerable and personal in that way.” Embracing cycles of creation and destruction in their edenic gardens or tearing apart and then recombining stuffed animals to reflect on adult anxieties, Okoyomon mischievously provokes audiences to question contemporary society.
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About the artists
Precious Okoyomon was born in 1993 in London and lives and works in New York City. The artist received their BA from Shimer College in 2013. Okoyomon works in sculpture, installation, and poetry: ranging from carefully researched gardens filled with invasive weeds, poisonous plants, and butterflies to the transformation of stuffed animals into fantastical beings. The artist frames childhood toys and non-human life as mirrors to better understand the human condition, whether by exploring complex relationships to beauty, violence, life, and death, or by confronting political structures such as antiblackness and colonial power. Balancing sharp critical inquiry with mischievous playfulness, the artist presents viewers with opportunities to reflect on our entanglement with history, the natural world, and one another.
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