Arcadia is Onabulé’s first in-person solo exhibition running at the excellent Camberwell-based gallery Sim Smith until 1st October.

The exhibition is a voyage through landscape, exploring our relationship to the natural world and our current ecological predicament. Onabulé works across a wide range of media in this exhibition drawing on her rich Greek, English and Nigerian heritage to present us with a diverse and history-spanning show with the premise of Arcadia at its heart.

“Our moment is one of climate catastrophe. Onabulé is attuned to rising temperatures and how that “affects our idea of place in the world.” The largest scale work in the exhibition, Burning Man, Burning Tree (2022), represents a paradise set afire, in which human and tree are both engulfed in flames. This fiery presence abstracts the setting while illuminating the two figures – human and tree, side by side. In unsettling the romanticism of the natural environment as pristine, Onabulé experiments with the idea of nature as untouched. The bucolic vision of arcadia is destabilized by the ecological realities of the planet we call home.” Alexandra M Thomas writes about the show.

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