Join Nola Ayoola as she reflects on the ideas and sensibilities that shaped her latest body of work, presented in the SOLO section of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2026. Speaking about her practice as a kind of visual diary, Ayoola describes listening as a meditative and embodied way of engaging with heritage, memory, and the environments she moves through. Ayoola shares how she considers materials as collaborators that absorb traces of lived experience, allowing her multidisciplinary practice to evoke the atmospheric echoes of African life — its histories, migrations, contradictions, and emotional registers — without reducing them to a single narrative.
A sound piece created especially for the fair by the artist is available at the end of this interview.
Your work is often described as a visual diary that explores heritage and its profound influence on identity. How does the act of listening shape your relationship to your heritage, and how does this listening find expression in your artistic practice?
Listening, for me, is meditative and reflective. It’s a way of being present. It has deeply shaped how I connect to my heritage. Certain sounds, whether in language, gesture, or the environments I move through, carry meanings tied to specific places and communities. Paying attention to these subtleties becomes a way of absorbing and documenting lived experience.
Listening is also a full-body practice in my work. Because of my synesthetic perception, sound often intersects with colour, texture, and movement, shaping how I perceive and translate the world around me. This heightened awareness allows memory to register not just intellectually, but sensorially.
In my practice, this form of listening finds expression through material. The tactile processes of weaving, painting, and layering become ways of tracing memory – registering presence and holding the emotional and cultural resonances I encounter. Through this approach, heritage becomes a living, sensory system rather than a fixed history: something felt, accumulated, and shared through interconnected relationships between people, places, and materials.
Your artworks delve into the African experience, capturing its complexities and nuances. In what ways do you interpret these “echoes” in your work, and what do you hope they convey to the audience about the African experience?
The African experience is layered and expansive – not singular or static, but always shifting and holding multiple histories at once. It carries tradition and contemporary life side by side, shaped by movement, memory, and everyday experience.
In my work, I think about “echoes” as the traces of those experiences: the ways history, culture, and lived moments continue to reverberate through the body, materials, and space. These echoes aren’t literal stories or images – they’re felt presences. They surface through colour as emotion, gesture as a form of remembering, and through materials that absorb process and take on reimagined forms. I often work with gathered and found materials, which function almost archivally; carrying residue, memory, and meaning from previous lives while holding their original contexts.
Working as an interdisciplinary artist allows me to explore these experiences in multiple ways through my own lens. My portraiture and figurative work often engage specific narratives, while my woven and abstract works move toward atmosphere and sensation. In those pieces, I aim to create environments that viewers can feel – spaces to pause and sit with the emotional weight of the work. Through this range of approaches, I hope to convey the richness, resilience, and complexity of African life: its capacity to hold contradictions, migration, spirituality, and imagination across generations.
Image courtesy of Damilare Adeyemi and Windsor Gallery
Your multidisciplinary approach incorporates various materials and mediums. Do the materials themselves “speak” to you, and if so, how do you interpret and respond to these “voices” in your creative process?
Yes, I think of materials as active collaborators in my practice. Each medium – textiles, paint, paper, and woven structures – carries its own texture, history, and responsiveness. They “speak” to me through resistance, absorption, layering, and transformation, and I respond intuitively, letting their qualities guide gesture, form, and composition.
This ongoing dialogue creates spaces where memory, intuition, and embodied experience can be registered and translated. Materials act as witnesses, absorbing and recording human presence or absence while carrying traces of ancestral knowledge. In this way, the material itself becomes a voice, preserving and reimagining heritage, emotion, and lived experience.
Nola Ayoola: Lagos is quiet on a Sunday (2026). Courtesy of the artist.