We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Adanma Nwankwo a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Adanma thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

Since reception, I have always enjoyed art class. I remember distinctively creating these paper chains that my school would use for class decorations during Christmas and the little doodles of my holiday I made for my primary holiday write-ups. I had a wonderful art teacher, who was like my heartwarming in-school grandparent. He would say I reminded him of his mother, obviously most likely not true, yet beautifully kind. I guess my love for art formed through those continually enthusiastic, fun and comforting engagements with it through my formative years, well into my Secondary years and A-levels. However, as school years increased, art did get harder. You can say that’s when I subconsciously realised I would most likely pursue a creative path professionally. Art was the only thing I allowed myself to fail joyfully or elatedly. If I made a mistake or wasn’t good enough, I simply wanted to get better and I enjoyed the process of getting better – the experimentation, the research, the observation and the connection. I could grow my whole self in the process of improving my skill in this field.

My official decision was a bit more chaotic to get to. After cancelling my university offers for BA Law based on an internal feeling that I wanted to do something else and no clear plan, I laid awake on a random Sunday. In my room talking to myself whilst staring at a painting I had made, I realised I wanted to do something professionally that was limitless and the only thing that popped into my head was art. That was how I knew, the creative path was the only one I wanted to pursue, as it would allow me to create paths of my own,

Adanma, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Adanma Nwankwo is an interdisciplinary Nigerian artist, based in London. Her works navigate the intersection and interplay between her personal history and collective history. Exploring topics around childhood, identity, heritage, migration, memory and documentation, her works aim to serve as personal archives retelling the stories of her ongoing investigation into her Nigerian heritage and its pre-colonial histories – investigating its links to culture, materiality, community and self. As a result, her works manifest through various media, namely photography, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, textile, performance, film, and installation. She has had multiple exhibitions across Nigeria, the UK and Canada.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Resilience has always shown up for me as a gentle reminder… A stubbornness if you will – an adamance to cling onto a sense of self-belief. Straight after university, I entered an eclipse of low self-esteem. I had finished university with First Class Hons in Fine Art, yet I had no clue what I was going to do. I kept applying for jobs, barely hearing back from most and being gently rejected from the rest. I left art school so confident and with each ‘no’, I could feel my confidence slowly chipping away. Could I really survive in the outside world? Could I land a job? Would I ever get to create art again, in a timeframe that wasn’t 5 years from now? I was filled with so much doubt as the final months of my first year out of university passed.

Tired of the rejections and what felt like repeated failures, I began the next year following a gentle resistance. In all the nos there was a quiet voice that so deeply wanted to believe that I had something to offer to the world that wasn’t just my poorly constructed CV and tired cover letters. So, I decided to try one more time for jobs and if that failed, to only focus on art. That year I ended up participating in more exhibitions than I thought I ever could in a year, with most of them being paid, even though I never imagined myself earning morning through art. Although I never gained full financial independence that year, I achieved a milestone in my art career that I didn’t even think was possible and proved something important to myself.

To me, resilience is holding on to a sense of self-belief even in moments when I feel too exhausted to muster it.

Have you ever had to pivot?

It was February 2019 and I was on course to study BA Law. My university offers were set and A-level grades were on track, yet I felt what Princess Moana would describe as “a quiet voice deep inside” telling me there was something else. I had wanted to study law for as long as I knew, it was the one thing I was sure of, still at that moment it felt like something was missing – like there was something else I was meant to do and I had no clue what it was. Hence, I revoked all my offers for Law and decided to start looking for a new course. I went from Law to thinking maybe psychology, anthropology, land architecture and even fashion design.

Just as randomly as I had felt the urge to leave Law, in the early hours of a random Sunday, I decided I would study Art. How did I make the decision? I was talking to myself late at night – as I usually do – staring at a painting I had made over the summer and then it hit me. In the painting was a girl chained in front of a portal which represented the path she was meant to take, yet outside the portal lived swirls that engulfed the entire landscape. Breaking away from the chain that held her to the portal, she flew towards the swirls instead, choosing to explore a path that had no bounds and create her own path. I realised that like the character in the piece, I wanted to be limitless and I wanted to study something that would allow me that exact freedom and in that moment the only thing that came to mind was Art.

Hence, with a month left till the start of the semester, I applied to study BA Art through clearance and changed the whole trajectory of my life and career. I’m still amused by how unexpected and unhinged the decision was and how chaotic the whole experience was and I’m so grateful because somehow it was exactly what I needed.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wwwadaeecom.wixsite.com/website-12
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adasartislife/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1Ze_EXU8J7CXdP9X2yZy8w

Image Credits

Shadow – River Goddess photographed by artist Hans Lam