By Anne Brice | Extracted from Berkeley News
Eniola Fakile’s creations live in another world.
Fakile is a photographer. A performance artist. A filmmaker. a sculptor. A costume designer. He works in textiles, ready-made objects, and assembly. She is not limited by what she has been or should be. Instead, she reaches out to see how far she can go. When an idea crosses her mind, she imagines a new universe in which she lives that idea, that creation.
“I’m addicted to complicating things,” she says. “I can never do something basic and easy. I like self-created chaos because I made it.”
She builds sculptures. Some that people wear, and that she wears, and often meticulously posed for. The more difficult the costumes to build, the better. They can be made of fuzzy fabric of neon color. Or long fluffy wigs. Or cotton balls and beads and crumpled tissue paper. Right now, she’s trying to figure out how to build a dress out of concrete, with an emphasis on the word “try,” she says.
As a Master of Fine Arts student in the Art Practice Department, she says the faculty encourages her to go further, to push herself to new depths of self-exploration. It’s something she’s been forced to do since she was a child: expose her ideas and herself to the world, no matter how painful it may be.
Berkeley News spoke to Fakile about the art-making process: “It’s 0.1% bravery and the rest is like, I need to get it out,” he says, and how he’s learning to accept his open nature, even when he doesn’t. I do not want
Berkeley News: Where did you grow up and what was your childhood like?
Eniola Fakile: I grew up in Stone Mountain, Georgia. I have two lovely immigrant parents who would do anything for me. My parents are from Nigeria. Although I was born in the United States, the atmosphere in my house was like: “Don’t forget that you are Nigerian. Don’t forget culture and family.” I am exactly the same as I was when I was a child. He wasn’t the kid that everyone was like, “Oh, they’re going to be artists.” I just did weird stuff. I liked playing outside, and I liked talking to the trees, playing in the dirt. I was a bubbly kid. I cried a lot. I still do it
Have you always been interested in creating art?
I feel like I’ve always been making art. He had an active imagination as a child. The first time I really got interested was in my first year of high school. My parents bought me my first digital camera when I was a freshman in high school. It was this basic little point-and-shoot thing. I always had my camera with me. I was always taking photos. I took photos of my friends. I took endless photos of trees. I took photos of my feet. I took photos of my hands. I took photos of the food. I really wanted to reintroduce myself to the world through a camera lens.
As a sophomore, I took a film photography class. I fell in love with how physical the practice is. It’s learning to handle things carefully, to work with chemicals, to go out and make mistakes, to go out again, to do better.
(Using herself as a ‘model’, Fakile worked on a series of videos. Part of one is her exploration of what it means to be a black woman.)
Eniola Fakile: With each video, I wanted to go deeper, but I also wanted the footage to get better. So, she was trying to progress as a videographer. I did it for a year, and during that time, I started to get more and more comfortable with myself on camera, talking about these things. And I always try to be very careful how I talk about being black in my work because the way I feel about it is complicated.
Don’t get me wrong, I love being black. But I feel like I want to work on being black without being exclusionary. So I try to do the work with little markers that I know other black people can relate to, but also everyday things that I know other people will respond to, so that it’s work that anyone can feel connected to. But especially the blacks.
So the series is about all of those things. It’s about me, as a black woman, dealing with my body image issues or dealing with my hair. But it’s also about me as a person dealing with the stress of everyday life, the imposter syndrome, that I don’t feel good enough. All those things.
Berkeley News: How do you approach creating art? Once you have an idea, where do you start?
Eniola Fakile: Every time I start a new series of work, I buy a journal and write what I want to talk about. The process involves a lot of crying. It’s about seeing the same things over and over again to get the design idea flowing. I like it, I’ll see new girl and again. I will look at it cruella – I love that movie. The Devil Wears Prada. There is a program called A discovery of witches with a season set in Elizabethan England.
When I come up with an idea for a sculpture or a costume or whatever you want to call them (I don’t have a name for them yet), it’s like a quick flash in my mind. I’ll do a really quick messy sketch. So, I try my best to build it. And change along the way.
My ideas are manifested from everyday things, like a hamburger. I’ll think: What is a hamburger? What if that burger had feelings? How do I turn that into a shoe? It sounds ridiculous. It involves a lot of fantasy and imagination, and I love doing it.
See more of Fakile’s work at your website Y Instagram page.
